


Just A Little Girl

by Zaffie



Category: Chicago PD (TV)
Genre: And Angst Which Is In The Past, F/M, Halstead And Lindsay Might Totally Date, Handstands Are Cool, I'm Sorry My Tagging Is Unusually Bad Today, If Their Work Didn't Rudely Interrupt, It's Stressful, Lindsay's Past Features A Bit, Oh And Hookers Are In This Too, Sometimes It's Hard To Do Good Tags, There Is Sexual Tension, There Might Be Handstands, Undercover Work Happens, You Should Read The Fic Anyway, but also angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-02-25 14:45:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2625641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaffie/pseuds/Zaffie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Lindsay goes undercover as a hooker and Halstead ends up throwing pebbles at her window at three in the morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Truth-or-dare is for teenagers, and if Jay wants to kiss her so badly then he should just ask.

It’s Burgess who suggests it, because if you give her too many shots of tequila she turns into a giggling twelve-year-old.

     “Truth or dare,” she says, and the smile on her face is so broad and disarming that it actually makes Erin want to take the alcohol away, because Burgess looks far too young to be drinking.

     “I am absolutely not playing truth or dare,” Erin warns.

     “You have to!” Burgess crows. She’s literally swaying in her seat. Someone has got to cut her off.

     “Babe,” Ruzek says. “Careful.” He takes another swig of his beer and drapes an arm across Burgess’ shoulders.

     “It might be fun,” Jay points out.

     Erin glares at him. “This is ridiculous. We’re all drunk anyway-”

     “But that’s when it’s fun!” Burgess interrupts. She points at Atwater. “Kevin. Come on. You want to play.”

     Atwater is practically squirming in his seat. He’s had less to drink than the rest of them, which is probably why he looks so uncomfortable as he says, “Uh, I don’t know…”

     “I’ll start,” Burgess announces. She is impossible to deter from her mission. “Adam. Truth. Who’s your favourite person?” She makes eyes at him when she says it, so it’s pretty obvious who he’s going to choose.

     “Definitely you, babe,” Ruzek says, and the two of them lean towards each other and start kissing. It’s actually incredibly obnoxious.

     Antonio arrives in the middle of the display. “What did I miss?”

     “Truth or dare,” Jay explains helpfully.

     Erin leans towards Antonio and mutters, “Get me out of here.”

     He laughs. “No way. I want to watch this.” He settles himself on a seat and twists the lid off his beer.

     “Okay, okay,” Ruzek says, stopping his blatant public display of affection to turn back towards the rest of them. “Atwater, man, I think I dare you to chug the rest of that cider.”

     Atwater’s bottle of cider is half-full. It doesn’t seem particularly impressive to Erin, which is probably why Atwater looks so relieved. He can do the dare without disappointing the drunk power couple over in the corner. Erin thinks she preferred it when Burgess and Ruzek were pretending _not_ to like each other.

     “Burgess, why don’t you take a truth?” Antonio suggests. “How much have you had to drink tonight?”

     “Oh come on, man, that’s a lame question,” Ruzek protests.

     “It was a _lot_ ,” Burgess grins. “Hey, hey, I’ve got one! Halstead, I dare you to kiss your partner. No, wait, I double dare you, and I’ll kiss Adam!” She goes for it.

     Jay, on the other hand, hesitates. He turns towards Erin and awkwardly says, “Well, in the spirit of the game…?”

     “No way,” she snaps. “This is ridiculous. Why are we even playing this game?”

     Honestly, there’s a part of her that wishes Jay would be brave enough to kiss her without the added bonus of alcohol and peer pressure. Another part of her thinks that maybe she should just take her chance and plant one on him. The rest of Erin – the bits which aren’t alcohol-addled – are telling her that this is a bad situation; she should call it quits and get out now, before something happens that she’ll regret.

     It’s a shame that Erin’s never been good at listening to herself.

     “It’s just a dare,” Jay says. “Are you scared?”

     Damn, he’s good at pressing her buttons. “No, I’m not scared. I’m just not drunk enough to act like an idiot yet.”

     “You might like it.” Is he leaning in?

     “I wouldn’t,” Erin assures him. The rest of the table has faded into background noise, although she’s pretty sure that Antonio has just taken Burgess’ drink away from her.

     “How do you know if you don’t try?” Jay questions.

     “Are you using toddler-eat-your-vegetables-logic on me?”

     “Is it working?”

     “I don’t know, but it’s definitely not sexy.”

     Burgess knocks Antonio’s beer onto the ground and laughs hysterically when the bottle shatters. Even that noise can’t deter Jay from his stupid kissing mission.

     “We both know you think I’m sexy.”

     “I don’t think you’re sexy,” Erin tells him. “I think firemen are sexy.”

     “Firemen… and me.”

     “You are so wrong right now.”

     “Am I wrong? Or am I sexy?”

     Atwater and Ruzek struggle to haul Burgess to her feet. Erin doesn’t know if she’s passed out or if she’s just too drunk to walk, but the guys are practically carrying her out of there.

     “We’re going to get a cab!” Ruzek hollers as they head for the door.

     “Admit it,” Erin says, “this has nothing to do with truth or dare.”

     “Are you sure?” Jay asks her.

     “Guys,” Antonio says, “did you hear me say I’m leaving?”

     They don’t answer him, but he leaves anyway.

     “You just want to kiss me,” Erin says.

     “Would it be so bad if I did?”

     “I don’t know. Why don’t you just do it, if you want to?”

     “Because I’m honestly afraid you’ll slap me,” Jay admits.

     They’ve been making eye contact for a really long time. It’s starting to get weird. Slowly, without looking away, Erin shakes her head.

     “I wouldn’t,” she tells him.

     “That’s lucky,” Jay says. He’s not moving. Damnit, why won’t he move?

     Erin’s had enough. She slides forward off her stool and at the same time, Jay ducks down and catches the back of her head with his hand. Their lips meet. Involuntarily, Erin closes her eyes, but her head is tilted up at just the right angle so that one of the hanging lights over the bar shines through her eyelids. It’s bright, which might be metaphorical, or something, because this is a damn amazing kiss. It would be better if she could see fireworks, though. It feels kind of stupid even when she thinks it, but hey, Erin’s drunk. She doesn’t need to think clearly, right?

     Jay pulls back. “There,” he says. “I kissed you.”

    “Great,” Erin mumbles, and tries to look like it wasn’t a big deal. “I think you won truth or dare.”

     “Yeah,” Jay agrees. “Too bad everyone else has gone home.”

     “We’d better go too,” Erin says, and then she realises what that sounded like. “I mean, _I’d_ better go. To my home. And you can go to your home.”

     “Okay,” he agrees.

   “Okay,” Erin nods.

     A couple of seconds pass before either of them actually turns to leave. Erin doesn’t realise that Jay’s hand is still on her waist until it slides away and he takes several steps back from her.

     “Bye,” he says.

    Erin’s head is starting to pound. “Bye,” she returns, and then she walks away from her partner and doesn’t look back.

     Damn, she’s going to be embarrassed about this tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a really bad case and the car is full of awkward silence.

Jay’s fully prepared to go the whole nine-yards and give Erin a heartfelt and mortified apology the next morning, because even through his pounding hangover, he can tell that he acted like an idiot.

     They both go for the coffee machine at the same time, and Jay thinks he should just speak up now and get it over with, but his partner refuses to even look at him. Sometimes, when Erin feels emotionally compromised, she just shuts down like this. Jay figures they probably won’t talk much today, so that’s cool. He can apologise tomorrow; or maybe he’ll follow Erin’s lead and just pretend it never happened.

     Voight storms through the bullpen like a one-man demolition crew, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. He nearly runs straight into Jay, who is carrying his full mug of coffee back to his desk. Jay is forced to pirouette like some kind of stupid, coffee-toting ballerina just to avoid his boss.

     Usually, an arrival of this magnitude – where Voight knocks over chairs and scatters papers from desks – heralds the beginning of a case that everyone will get seriously emotionally invested in. Jay sets down his coffee, and looks up at the board when Voight slaps a photo up there. It’s a teenage girl. Damn, Jay hates the cases with children.

     Erin nods at the board. “Who is she?”

     “Leonor Acosta. They found her this morning, half-dead in the back of a van.” He throws up another photo of the same girl, battered and bruised.

     Jay takes a sip of his coffee. “What happened?”

     Voight ignores the question. “These two girls were with her,” he says instead, and adds two more pictures. Both of them are obviously lying on autopsy slabs – one pale and blond, and the other with dark black skin and thick curly hair. They don’t look much older than the first victim. “We’ve identified them as Katia Dugard and Leslie Walker. Their parents should be coming in later today.” Voight looks around for Erin. “I’d like it if you could talk to them,” he says. “Atwater, you too.”

     Atwater looks surprised. “Yeah, okay,” he nods.

     “In the meantime, Ruzek, Olinsky, see what you can track down about the van they were found in. There were no plates, so dig up anything you can. Halstead, take Lindsay and go and interview our victim at the hospital.” Voight taps Leonor’s picture on the board. “This kid is fourteen years old,” he says. “I want the guys who did this.”

 

It’s completely silent in the car on the way to the hospital. Not a comfortable silence, either. The air is thick and heavy with tension. Erin’s hands are tight on the steering wheel and she glares straight ahead. Jay can’t tell if she’s upset because of what happened last night, or what they’re going to see. He’s a little bit afraid to break the silence and ask.

     They walk through the hospital together, but Jay stays a step behind his partner. When they get into the elevator, he stands at the back, and she stands in front of him. She can’t quite bring herself to look at him.

     Anything angry about Erin melts away as soon as they get through the door of the hospital room, though. Her posture seems to soften, making her look more open, approachable and empathic. Jay really admires the way she does this, honestly.

     “Hey,” Erin says quietly. She moves over to the bed and looks down at the little girl lying in it.

     Leonor looks smaller than fourteen tucked between the white sheets. She’s got coffee-coloured skin, marred by a huge purple bruise around one of her eyes. There’s a cut on her cheekbone that looks like it was made by a ring, and Jay can see clear finger-marks on her throat.

     “Hi,” the child whispers. “You’re police, aren’t you?”

     “Yeah,” Erin nods. “We’re going to find out who did this to you, okay?”

     Leonor shakes her head. “You can’t,” she says sombrely. Her throat is scratchy, and her voice comes out in hisses and whistles, probably from a swollen windpipe.

     “I promise we’ll find them,” Erin says. “Trust me.” She reaches out for Leonor’s hand, lying on the blankets, and takes it in her own.

     Jay moves closer. “Listen, Leonor,” he starts, “anything you can tell us will really help, okay? The guys who hurt you – did you know them?”

     “Yes,” Leonor rasps. “They own me.”

     She sounds matter-of-fact about it, like it’s not a big deal, but Jay still cringes. He’s run across it before but it’s hard to hear. “Do you owe them money?” he asks the teenager. It’s a long shot. Jay’s not surprised when Leonor shakes her head.

     “My dad does,” she admits. “He told me it would just be for a couple of weeks, but they never took me back home.” Her eyes get watery.

     “Sweetheart,” Erin says, “this is going to be hard, but can you tell me what they made you do?”

     Leonor hesitates. Her eyes flick up to Jay.

     “I might go and get something from the vending machine,” he says easily, taking the hint. “Want anything, Leonor?”

     “Starburst,” she whispers, and Jay laughs.

     “Sure,” he agrees, and leaves the room.

     The vending machine is just down the hall, but Jay lingers there longer than necessary, giving Erin a chance to make Leonor open up. He buys a packet of Starburst for the girl, and a Coke for himself, because he’s hoping the extra caffeine will knock out the throbbing in his temples and jaw.

     Erin’s sitting on the bed when he gets back to the room, talking quietly. Leonor doesn’t seem to upset, but she sniffles a little bit when he arrives, and rubs at her eyes like she’s embarrassed. She’s been crying, then.

     Jay tosses the Starburst at her. “Catch.”

     She smiles weakly. “Thanks.”

     “If you remember anything else, or even if you just need to talk, you can call me,” Erin tells the girl. “This is my card, okay?”

     “Erin Lindsay,” Leonor reads.

     “That’s me.”

     “Okay.”

     Jay waves and follows his partner out of the room. “So?” he asks Erin as soon as they’re out of earshot.

     “So what?”

     “What did she say?”

     Erin shrugs. “They pimped her out, like I thought.”

     “That’s disgusting,” Jay says.

     “We’re going to get these guys,” Erin insists. “I swear we’re going to get them.”

     By the time they get back in the car, the awkward wall of silence has reappeared between them. This time, though, Erin isn’t pissed. She’s practically buzzing with determination. Jay’s almost scared. He can’t tell how far she will go for this case, and it worries him. He needs to know his partner’s limits so that he can have her back all the way.

***

Katia’s parents are waiting for Erin when she arrives back. She leaves Jay with the car and heads up to talk to them.

     Atwater follows her into the room, dogging her steps like a quiet but very large shadow. He’s a little bit nervous, Erin thinks, but he’s got the instincts for this kind of discussion. He’s empathic, stoic and determined. It’s a good combination.

     In the end, the news is what Erin had expected.

     “Katia was a good girl,” the mother says tearfully, “but she got into trouble.”

     “Drugs,” the father clarifies. “She had an addiction problem.”

     “We tried to help her,” the mother insists, “but she couldn’t stop.”

     “She borrowed money from us,” the father adds, picking up the tale. “So eventually we had to cut her off. We thought it would help.”

     “When was that?” Erin asks quickly.

     “About eight months ago,” the man tells her.

     “And when was the last time you heard from Katia?”

     The mother bursts into loud, somewhat hysterical sobs. Erin gives Atwater a look. He shuffles his chair forward and gingerly puts an arm over the woman’s shoulders. “Ma’am,” he says, “would you like to come with me to get some tea?”

     The woman nods, heavily, and allows Atwater to help her to her feet and out of the room.

     “It was about six months ago,” the father says, after they’ve watched his wife leave. “She called us and she was very upset. She said she needed money – I told her no.” He sighs, and stares at his hands, twisting his fingers on top of the table. “Detective, is this my fault?”

     “No,” Erin says gently. “As long as you did your best for her, there was nothing more you could have done.”

     “Thank you,” the man nods, “but I fear you’re mistaken.”

     There isn’t really much Erin can say to that.

 

After Katia’s parents have left, she goes to fill the rest of the squad in on what they’ve learnt. “Katia was nineteen-”

     “Twenty,” Atwater corrects quickly. “Her mother mentioned that she’d just had a birthday…”

     “Okay, so twenty,” Erin agrees. “Nineteen when she went off the grid about six months ago, which is also when we tentatively suspect she was kidnapped or coerced into prostitution, like Leonor. Her parents said that she had a drug habit and they eventually stopped giving her cash to feed it. Presumably she got into debt with the wrong people…”

     “And this is their way of making her pay up,” Voight interrupts. He’s glowering at the board. “All right, so what do you think we’re looking for? A dealer who feeds into some kind of prostitution ring? Maybe more than one?”

     Everyone’s sitting up more intently now, staring at the board.

     “We can check in with CIs,” Antonio offers. “If something like this is going on, people will know about it.”

     “Why don’t we know about it?” Olinsky wonders. “These guys have been careful. They’re covering their tracks.”

     “So we don’t want to let them even _suspect_ that we’re onto them,” Voight agrees. “I want a twenty-four hour guard posted on Leonor Acosta at the hospital. Chances are, if they meant to kill her and didn’t get it done, they’ll send someone back to finish the job.”

     They disband, everyone going their separate ways to do their own thing. Nadia calls Erin over. “Leslie Walker’s mother is waiting downstairs,” she says quietly.

     “Okay. Thanks.”

     “Erin?” Nadia asks quickly. “Can I talk to you about something?”

     Erin’s all set to remind Nadia that she actually has to work right now, but a look at the other woman’s face changes her mind pretty quickly. She beckons Atwater over. “Hey, can you take this one?”

     He nods. “Yeah, of course.”

     “Thanks,” Erin says, and she puts a hand on Nadia’s shoulder and walks her to the end of the room, where it’s quiet and they’ll have some privacy. “All right, what is it?”

     “I think I know these guys,” Nadia says. “It was one of those stories some of the pimps used to tell, you know? Like, oh, how much worse would your life be if you were working for _these guys_.”

     “All right,” Erin says carefully. She rubs between Nadia’s shoulder blades. “Are you okay?”

     “Yeah.”

     “Good. Do you have any idea where they operate out of?”

     Nadia shakes her head, and then, tentatively, adds, “But I might know one of the dealers who turns girls in to them.”

     “Okay,” Erin nods. She thinks about it for a second, and then she tells Nadia, “Set me up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I actually wrote this before I saw the three-part-crossover (which I'm still in the middle of right now xD) because I am about a week behind on all of my shows, but it seems to fit in pretty well for where I planned this fic to go. Hooray for canon being awesome! I approve.
> 
> Comments are the lifeblood of Zaffies (that was a lie) so comment and let me know what you think :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Undercover work is hard, and boring, and then it just gets plain uncomfortable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been such a long time! You know how this fic updating thing is sometimes super slow... I've been busy xD But here, have a new chapter and enjoy it! Merry Christmas!

It’s going to be a long-term op. They know that from the beginning, when Erin briefs Voight on what she’s learnt and requests to go undercover.

     Voight’s trying to pretend that he’s not angry about her taking the risk. “It’s a good idea,” he says, “but I’m worried it will take too long.”

     “Hey, if we get a lead in the next few days, it won’t matter,” Erin agrees. “But if we _don’t_ …”

     “All right,” their boss concedes.

     He pulls Erin off the streets to minimise the chances of someone identifying her as a cop. Jay is partnered with Atwater, and things carry on.

     There are no new leads. Voight starts getting pressure to take on other cases, and eventually he caves. They’re sent after a black market arms dealer.

     Jay walks back into the office on Thursday morning after interviewing the dealer’s mother and finds his partner typing furiously. Her hair is a tangled cloud around her face, her hooded jacket has mud on it, and she’s got two empty coffee mugs on her desk.

    “Had enough coffee today?” Jay asks. He’s pretty sure she’s used each of those mugs at least twice.

     It takes Erin a second to switch her attention from the computer to him. “I’m sick of paperwork,” she says, “I haven’t brushed my hair in three days and I’m staying out every night to try and get attention from the stupid dealer.”

     “So… no, you haven’t had enough coffee?”

     Erin holds out one of the mugs. “Please get me a refill?”

     “Yeah, okay,” Jay agrees. “But if Voight asks why you’re bouncing off walls, I’m going to lie and say I had no idea you were on such a coffee high.”

     “Ha ha,” Erin tells him sourly. “Just get me the damn coffee, smartass.”

     For some reason, when Erin’s in a bad mood, the rest of them are in a bad mood. With the exception of Ruzek, who has no concept of hints or emotional tension, they all whine, grizzle, and argue their way through the next week-and-a-half.

     After three weeks of buying drugs which she continually refuses to show Ruzek, Erin comes into work with a split lip and bruised cheekbone.

     “It’s fine,” she announces when Antonio jumps to his feet in outrage, Olinsky shakes his head slowly and Voight stares murderously across the room. “He got a bit pissy when I said I’d pay him tomorrow.”

     “Next time, you hit him first,” Voight tells her.

     Erin snorts. “Um, yeah, because _that’s_ a good response. I’m seriously fine.”

     Jay corners her in the break room, when she goes to get more coffee. “Are you really okay?”

     “Of course,” Erin tells him. “It was just a little smack in the mouth. I’ve had much worse.”

     “That’s not the point,” Jay protests. “Maybe you should have someone go under with you. For backup.”

     “I hate to break it to you, Jay, but you’re not exactly hooker material.”

     “Hey, guys can be hookers!” He wonders if she’s thinking of Teddy. He is.

     “I don’t think they’re looking for guys,” Erin says. She pats his cheek, lightly. “Thanks anyway, though.”

     At the end of the day, Jay goes to see Voight.

     “I want to go undercover,” he says, straight to the point. “Somewhere I can watch out for my partner.”

     “I’ll think about it,” Voight tells him. That’s as far as the conversation goes.

    

Erin starts to go back to Jay’s apartment after buying, instead of her own.

     “In case they follow me,” she explains.

     “Are you trying to say that my apartment is a more realistic place for a drug addict low on cash to live?”

     Erin glances around, slowly, deliberately, before she smirks at him and says, “Yeah, pretty much. Do you have coffee?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, just starts nosing around the cupboards.

     “It’s late,” Jay says. “Why don’t you try and sleep instead?”

     Erin’s eyes are red-rimmed and her hair is a greasy bird’s nest. The clothes she wears are getting progressively more baggy and shabby. “I can’t sleep, I’m filthy and I feel like crap,” she tells him. “It’s almost like I really am a junkie.”

     “Method acting,” Jay says, nodding. “I get that.”

     “You’re a terrible actor. I don’t know why they ever let you undercover at all.” Erin finds a mug, rinses it out and keeps looking for coffee.

     “Just have warm milk, or something,” Jay tells her. “You’re getting a caffeine addiction.” He’s worried about how little she’s been sleeping.

     “I want the damn coffee, Jay.”

     “Hot chocolate,” he bargains.

     “Will you make it?”

     “Yes.”

     “All right,” she concedes, and she presses the mug into his chest and goes over to the sofa, where she slumps in a heap and sighs heavily.

   “Stop beating yourself up about this damn case,” Jay tells her.

     “I need to catch these bastards, and it’s not happening,” Erin says furiously. “I should be doing more.”

     “That’s not fair.” He sticks the mug in the microwave. “It’s going to take time, we knew that going in.”

     “It’s been five weeks.”

     “So give it another week, and then get all pissy.”

     She laughs a little bit, and goes quiet. Jay brings over the hot chocolate, stirs it, and passes Erin the mug. He sits down beside her and turns the TV on, with the volume down low.

     The program is actually interesting, and Jay finds himself watching, concentrating to catch every quiet word, so he’s a little bit surprised when he turns to Erin to make some comment and she’s asleep. The mug is still in her hand, wobbling on her leg, so he takes it away from her and drains the dregs before he sets it on the table.

***

Cold, dawn light wakes Erin, and she sits upright on what she now realises is Jay’s sofa and scrubs a hand through her hair. It feels gross, and the tangles yank at her scalp when she touches them. Maybe if she brushes it this morning she can mess it up again by the evening, when she has to go back to the dealer and start pawning stuff, because she’s supposed to have run out of cash by now.

     Carefully, Erin levers herself to her feet, hopes she doesn’t wake Jay, and lets herself quietly out of the apartment. She didn’t mean to stay the whole night – just an hour or so, and then go back to her place. She doesn’t remember falling asleep on the couch, but it obviously happened.

     She’s been getting Jay to take her car home after work and park it in the basement, where no one can see it. In the evenings, when there might be a tail on her, she takes public transport. It’s a relief to be back inside her own vehicle, but it’s starting to smell weird, which is probably from her disgusting clothes. Erin drives home with all four windows wide open, even though it’s freezing.

     In the house, she brushes her teeth and hair and gets into the shower for about a minute before she hops out, bundles the smelly clothes into a bag she can take with her, and puts on something clean for work.

     Unusually, Ruzek is the only one there when she arrives.

     “You’re early,” she says.

    “You too.”

     “What’s up?”

     Gloomily, Ruzek props his elbows on the desk. “Burgess and I had a fight so she kicked me out.”

     “Permanently?”

     “Nah, just this morning. She’ll get over it soon, I think.”

     “What did you do?”

     He looks offended. “Why do you assume _I_ did something?”

     “Because it’s true?”

     “Yeah, all right,” the man admits. “And I’m not going to tell you. Don’t you guys do girl talk, anyway?”

     “Not so much,” Erin says, and then she gestures down at herself, “and especially not lately.”

     “Don’t work too hard,” Ruzek advises. “You can get lost in these kind of undercover ops.”

     “This coming from the rookie with no experience.”

     “I mean it, Lindsay,” he says. “Be careful.”

     She shrugs the warning off, even if it resonates a little bit. She knows what she’s doing.

 

In the evening, Erin goes to see her dealer.

     He’s a short man who seems to have a bit of a complex about it. His beard is patchy, his hair is scruffy, and he has several irritating facial tics.

     “Back again, darlin’?” he drawls when Erin turns up.

     She hunches herself further into the giant coat she’s wearing, shivers, and says, “Shut up. Let’s just get this over with.”

     He lifts his eyebrows meaningfully, and the left one starts jumping erratically. “I’m gonna need to see what you’ve got.”

     The watch is old, broken, and also Voight’s. He’d given it to her earlier in the day, so Erin lifts it out of her pocket and says, “This is worth it.”

     “No it’s not,” Craig says at once. “Don’t play with me, girl.”

     She hadn’t expected him to go for it, but Erin still makes a show, wheedling and pleading, and eventually she says, “Just give me some now and I’ll bring you something _real_ good tomorrow.”

     The man bunches his hands into fists. “We’ve discussed my policies, I think. I don’t take no promises as payment.”

     “I paid you last time, didn’t I? You know I’m good for it. Come on, just give me another day. I really need this.”

     Craig laughs. “Go through the stuff fast, don’t you? Maybe you should go a day without; learn some self-control.”

     “Bastard,” she tells him, and he lunges. He’s slow, and she sees the move in his eyes before it happens. She fights the urge to duck out of the way. Craig’s meaty hand closes in her hair and Erin yelps as he drags her face close to his.

     “What did you call me?” he growls.

     “Nothing, I’m sorry, I didn’t say anything.”

     “You better not.”

     She shakes her head rapidly and he releases her. Wincing, Erin rubs her head and says, “Will you take the watch or not? It’s all I have right now. Come on, I need a hit.”

     “You better get me something good tomorrow,” he says at last, and he pockets the watch. “It just better be real good, that’s all I’m saying, or I’m going to think of a new way for you to start paying me back.”

     Erin inhales sharply at the mention of her goal, and then covers it with a cough and a splutter as she takes what Craig passes her. “Thank you,” she says, and repeats it a few times as she backs away.

     Another week, she tells herself, as she walks through the cold, dark streets. She’ll keep working this for another week and if nothing has happened by then, things will get more serious.

     The thought of arresting Craig and putting him in the Cage for a night or two cheers Erin up immensely. She pushes her hands deep into the pockets of her big coat and wonders if she can persuade Jay to make her hot chocolate again when she gets back to his place.

 

It’s just a quick stop, this time – long enough for Erin to drink hot chocolate and then pick up her car and head home. She gets the distinct feeling, as she leaves, that Jay is glad to see the back of her, but she doesn’t know why.

     The next five days pass in a haze of exhaustion. It’s getting harder for Erin to sleep. She sees the faces of the dead girls at night. She’s already visited Leonor in foster care once, to try and glean any more information, but the girl can’t remember anything. She’s called Erin, though, twice, late at night with a sob in her voice and a desperate request for Erin to catch the men who hurt her.

     Erin promises that she’ll get them, and she tries to believe it. She really tries.

     Craig is being absurdly patient all of a sudden; accepting Erin’s excuses, allowing her to pay him next to nothing and not saying a word or even slapping her around any more. She wonders if he’s given up.

     Then, on Tuesday night, a new man is waiting with Craig.

     Every muscle in Erin’s body tenses when she sees him, and she doesn’t bother to hide it. She _should_ be weary of a new man appearing like this.

     “What’s going on?” she asks Craig bluntly.

     Craig gestures to the guy, who is young, clean-shaven and far more neatly kept than Erin. “This is Roland.”

     “Yeah, so?” Erin says rudely.

     “So Roland wanted to meet you.”

     She makes a point of yawning, and sticks her hands back in her pockets. “Is Roland a narc, Craig?”

     “No,” Roland says, and smiles. He’s softly-spoken, too, and slender. He should seem harmless – but something about him makes Erin uncomfortable. There’s a hardness behind his eyes.

     “Then what is he doing here?” she asks her dealer, refusing to address Roland directly.

     “He just wanted a look,” Craig says.

     “Look at what?” Erin asks. She looks at Roland again. His eyes sweep her up and down.

     “Take off your coat,” he suggests.

     Erin clutches the baggy fabric tighter. “No.”

     “Don’t say no to me.”

     “What is this, man?” she appeals to Craig.

     “You owe me some money,” Craig tells her. “Roland here is going to make you work to pay it off.”

     Erin shakes her head rapidly. “Nah – nah, I can pay you, I swear. Look, I have, um…” she pauses, searches her pockets frantically, and comes up with a necklace, “this, see, it’s silver or something.”

     Roland takes it from her, looks at it, and discards it. “Junk,” he says contemptuously.

     “Okay, but I have this belt, see? It’s real leather.” She pulls it out of her jeans and tosses it at Roland.

     “Imitation,” he says. “You’re in debt.”

     “My boots are, um, suede or something, I swear.” They are legitimate suede boots, but Erin has had them since she was fifteen, so they’re faded and patchy now.

     Roland takes a step forward, and Erin sways back, away from him. “Why don’t you just come and do some work for me?” he suggests.

     “I – no, I can’t, I’m looking for a job…”

     “You’d have a good supply,” he says, and he gestures to Craig.

     Erin pauses. “Yeah?” she asks, shifting from foot to foot. “Would I still have to pay?”

     “Not a dime,” Roland promises. He’s already looking satisfied.

     “But, um, what sort of work is it?” She’s twisting her head, biting her lip, twitching as if she’s both anxious and eager.

     “All sorts,” Roland tells her. “We’ll see what you’re best suited for. Most of it would be at a mate’s house – is that okay?”

     “Like odd jobs?” Erin says, and feigns relief. “I mean, I guess I could do stuff like that…”

     “Just come with me, and we’ll get you started,” Roland instructs.

     “Tonight? But I, um, no, not tonight.”

     “Do you want a hit tonight?” he asks.

     Erin nods reluctantly. “Well, yeah, I do, but-”

     “Then you’ll come with me tonight,” he says.

     “Okay,” Erin agrees at last, giving in. “Okay, let’s go. Can I call my boyfriend first?”

     Roland and Craig exchange a look. “Sure, sweetheart, call whoever you want,” Craig tells her. “Just let him know you’ll be going away to work for a little while.”

     Erin glances up sharply. “Away? How far is this house?”

     “Oh, not far,” Roland says. “It’s better than being in debt, though, right?”

     She subsides. “Yeah, right. Yeah.” Her fake phone is in her pocket. It’s a cheap flip phone, and there are only a few numbers programmed in. Erin dials the one that says ‘J’. She takes a few steps away from Craig and Roland, but glances over her shoulder to see they are still watching her.

     Jay picks up. “Hey,” he says, cautious but in-character. Everyone on the team has this number.

     “Hey, baby,” Erin croons.

     “What’s happened?” he asks, instantly alert. “Are you coming over?”

     “Nah, I’m gonna go… away for a little while. For work. Some guy got me a job – it sounds easy, so I’ll call you soon, okay?”

     “Is it safe?” Jay checks in an undertone. It means he wants to know if anyone else can hear them.

   “Yeah,” Erin says, tipping her head on one side, nodding against the phone. Roland and Craig are talking in low voices behind her.

     “Is it the pimp, Erin?”

     “I think so,” she says, keeping her tone light.

     “We’ll keep tabs on you,” Jay promises. “I’ll call Voight. Just be careful, okay?”

     “Yeah,” she says again, and then, “Bye, baby. Love you.”

     “Aww, I love you too my smoochiewoochiepie,” he teases, and then she flips the phone shut.

     “All done?” Roland asks, wandering over. “Come on, we’d better go.”

     “Can I have, my, um…” she gestures to Craig.

     “Later,” Roland says. “When we get there. See, that’s my car over there. Come on, let’s go.” He puts a hand on her back and ushers her towards the car, pushing hard so that she can’t baulk or turn back.

     “You’ll get me a hit?” Erin checks.

     “Yeah, of course, just later. Go on, get in the car. Good girl.”

     His voice, and his words, are making her sick, as does the trail of his hand over her hair and down her cheek when she ducks into the back seat of the car. It smells of stale fear and urine in here. Erin hugs her knees to her chest and doesn’t bother with a seatbelt. Roland gets into the front. He doesn’t turn around to talk to her, but there’s a _click_ as all four doors lock, and then the car peels away with a screeching of rubber.

     Erin stares out the black window and takes a deep breath. This is it, she tells herself. This is what she’s been waiting for. A chance to take these bastards down. Don’t screw up.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erin's going places. Weird, loud, smelly places.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick warning: this chapter really does deserve the 'mature' rating, so if you're not ready to deal with sex, drugs and rock 'n roll then better not to read. 
> 
> Look, an update! I'm quite pleased with myself - just when Chicago PD starts again, too. How awesome was that last episode?

Erin keeps watching out the window while they drive, so that she knows where she is. She feels pretty confident about their location when they stop, and Roland comes around the back to open the door and pull her out.

     “Why don’t you take off your coat now?” he suggests.

     “It’s cold out,” Erin tries.

     “We’re about to go inside. Come on, it’s not hard.” He’s already pulling at the coat, peeling it away from her, and so Erin gives up and lets him pull it off. She tries to be oblivious as his eyes run over her agonisingly slowly.

     “Can we go in?” she asks, and shivers.

     “Sure, just in here,” Roland says. He keeps his hand on her back as he pushes her through the door and into a dimly lit club full of noise and movement.

     There’s a song playing that Erin has heard before; something about _tonight I’m loving you_ , only this version doesn’t use the word _loving_. There’s a sort of haze in the air which makes her think of cigarettes or marijuana, and there are a couple of girls dancing up on a small stage. There are guys in lounges along both sides of the room, with scantily clad girls bending over them. Most of it looks like over-the-pants stuff, but over in the corner Erin sees someone lowering his zipper. She flicks her eyes away fast.

     “This way,” Roland tells her. He ushers her through another door and down a set of concrete stairs. The music gets fainter as they go deeper, but it’s still clearly audible, and there are vibrations from the heavy bass line. It’s cold down here, probably because of all the concrete. They’re walking through a narrow corridor, and there are doors set into the walls on both sides of them. Erin tries not to listen to whatever’s going on behind those doors.

     One of the doors is open, and Roland shoves her in. There’s a dirty mattress and a cracked sink.

     “Just stay here for now,” he says, and then he backs out and closes the door before Erin has a chance to move. She hears the lock.

     A sort of desperation creeps over Erin then. She’s just now starting to realise that she’s done exactly what she swore she wouldn’t – she’s screwed up. She’d been so sure that Roland would take her straight to the head of the operation, but this place isn’t even close. He’s left with her coat and the flip-phone in its pocket; _stupid_ , she berates herself, and she expects that they’ll want her to prove herself before she gets any deeper into this group.

     Erin paces the room and eventually sits down on the mattress and very carefully doesn’t examine the stains she’s sitting on. Basically, it all comes down to whether or not she’s willing to have sex with a stranger to keep her cover.

     Above her, the song changes. The melody is quieter in this one, and all Erin can hear is the throbbing beat. Across the hall from her, she hears a door open and a man’s deep voice thanking someone. There’s a high-pitched giggle in response.

     How many of those girls are here by choice? It doesn’t seem to matter how hard they work to shut them down; ten more places just like this one will spring up. Erin stands up and starts pacing again. It feels like a hopeless fight. Upstairs, the song launches into its chorus, and now Erin recognises it. _Sticks and stones may break my bones but chains and whips…_ it’s by Rihanna.

     Enough thinking, she tells herself. Time to do something. She’s spent long enough in this room to be sure that there’s nothing more high-tech than that sink in here, and also that no one has touched that mattress in months, at least. Erin fishes her phone – her real phone – from the side of her bra and texts Jay the address of the place where she is and anything else she can think of that might help.

   He doesn’t reply, which surprises her, so she sends him some more. _It’s foul down here. I’m not learning anything, but I’m probably contracting every STD known to man._

     The song changes. _I’m bringing sexy back_ , a husky voice croons.

     She texts Jay again. _Also, there’s really bad music._

     The sound of a key in the lock startles her, and she moves fast, sliding her phone under the mattress and then moving over to lean against the sink.

     Roland reappears in the doorway. “Sorry that took so long.”

     Erin fidgets, shifting from foot to foot. “This isn’t the kind of work I want to do,” she says. “Just… just let me leave and I’ll pay you, okay?”

     “Oh, I don’t think so,” he smiles, “but you’re right. This work isn’t for you.”

     Erin has no idea where he’s going with this. She nods rapidly, fidgets with the broken tap in front of her. “Yeah – yeah, I don’t wanna do this.”

     “You’re filthy and you smell like crap, but you’re too pretty to be a crack whore,” Roland tells her.

     She clenches her jaw and her fists. “What do you mean?”

     “Come on, we’re going somewhere special,” Roland says. “Gonna clean you up a bit.”

     They go out of the room, past another open door which shows a girl who looks about nineteen lying on a bed and staring blankly at the ceiling, then back up the concrete stairs and into the main part of the building. The song changes again as they get there – Erin doesn’t even know this one. Something about a candy shop? It’s all the same kind of music, anyway, and it’s painfully loud up here. It’s a huge relief when they go outside and get back into the car and suddenly everything’s quiet.

     Erin’s exhausted. She leans her head against the car window and says, “Can I have my coat back?”

     “Oh… yeah,” Roland says. “Sure. It’s in the back, there, next to you.”

     She pulls the coat over to her and drapes it across her, then closes her eyes, like she’s going to sleep. Under the cover of the coat, she fumbles her flip phone out of the pocket and tucks it down the side of her jeans, pressed up against her skin. The guys should be able to trace the signal from her real phone back to her last location, but now she’s down to one phone, and she needs to keep this one close.

     She’s too nervous to really sleep, but she does doze off a little bit while they drive. Every now and then she slits her eyes open to try and get a look out the window, but it’s too dark to see much. She recognises a couple of streets, but she’s pretty sure Roland is taking a winding, back-tracking sort of route to try and keep her disoriented.

     “Here,” he says after a while, and hands a syringe back to her.

     Erin takes it. Does he expect her to shoot up in front of him? She has no idea what’s in this thing – but someone who’s desperate enough to get herself into this mess should be desperate enough to take whatever’s offered to her.

     “Great,” she says, slurring a little bit through sheer exhaustion. “Thanks. Thanks. Great.”

     Under the coat, she fiddles with the syringe and wonders what her solution is here. She’s about to squirt the syringe into the car seat and just act high when Roland pulls over and parks by the side of the road.

     “Here, let me do it,” he says.

     Erin’s instantly suspicious. He wants to make sure she injects the stuff. Why would he care so much? “I can do it,” she says.

     “You’ll let me do it,” he orders, and he pulls the coat off her and takes the syringe out of her hand. “Give me your arm.”

     He doesn’t wait for her to offer it – he grabs her wrist and roughly yanks her arm out straight. He pushes her sleeve up and Erin’s grateful that she went the extra mile for this one – she’s been injecting small doses of heparin into her arms for a couple of weeks. The puncture wounds and bruises mimic track marks, and Roland doesn’t look surprised. He finds a vein fast and expertly and depresses the plunger on the syringe.

     Erin’s heart is going so fast she wonders if she’s about to pass out. She hopes that the needle is sterile; hopes that her reaction to whatever she’s been given won’t be _too_ violent.

   Roland makes a small, appreciative noise and gets back into his seat, starting the engine again. Erin pulls her sleeve down and grabs her big coat again. She’s shivering violently, partly from nerves.

     It doesn’t take very long for her to start feeling the effects of whatever she’s been given. Whatever it is, it’s not something she recognises. It’s certainly not heroin. Everything gets blurry, and then becomes very amusing. Erin suddenly finds it _hilarious_ that she’s a police officer in a car with a criminal. She doesn’t think anything has ever been quite this funny before, and she almost tells Roland, to let him share in the joke, but some kind of deep preservation instinct stops her. She mustn’t tell, she mustn’t tell. It makes her feel uncomfortable, to be forced to keep this secret, and it makes her want to share something else instead.

     She says, “Jay’s funny.”

     “Who’s Jay?” Roland asks.

     Erin shrugs, because there’s a word for what Jay is but she can’t remember it. She struggles to find alternative words and lands on; “Boyfriend.” That doesn’t sound right. “Buddy?” No, that’s not it either. “He’s my… he’s my…”

     At that point, she passes out.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a trigger warning too, for mature and potentially upsetting material related to past child abuse. It's in the first section of the chapter.
> 
> I was gonna do a chapter summary but then I realised, if I was honest, this one's kind of filler. Sorry about that. I'm setting things up for later on, which is what all filler does. Hope it's good anyway! Oh, and how FANTASTIC has canon been? Yay!
> 
> Just as a quick aside, I hate using the word panties because it grosses me out and it sounds weird (I'm Australian, and it's not a commonly used word here) but if I'm writing from the POV of an American character I guess it makes sense. If anyone knows an alternative American word for undies, let me know so I can be less grossed out? :)
> 
> Enjoy

Erin doesn’t know exactly how old she was the first time it happened. She can’t remember, although she does know that it was late summer, so it must have been around her fifth birthday, either just before or just after.

     What she _does_ remember is her mother waking her up when it was dark outside and taking her downstairs to meet ‘some new friends’.

     She’s wearing one of her mother’s too-big t-shirts as a nightdress, and it goes down to her skinny, grazed knees. Erin remembers looking at her feet and stumbling a little bit when her mother walks her along the hallway and down the stairs. She remembers watching the swirling hem of the shirt and scuffing her feet on the carpet and looking up when her mother ushers her into the living room and says, “Ta da!” in a high-pitched, happy voice.

     There are four men sitting on Erin’s couches and chairs, and they’re all smiling. She doesn’t know who any of them are and it makes her a little bit scared, so she puts her hair in her mouth and starts chewing.

     Her mother yanks the strand of hair away. “Don’t do that, Erin, that’s yucky,” she says, and Erin pouts and takes a step backwards, pulling her hand out of her mother’s hand and folding her arms across her chest.

     She thinks the men asked how old she was, but she doesn’t remember much about that conversation now. She knows that her mother said something to them, too, and she thinks that she saw them digging in their pockets for money. It hadn’t seemed so odd to her at the time. Vividly, she remembers her mother picking her up with hands under her armpits and putting her down on a man’s lap.

     Erin goes all rigid as she sits there, because this man is a stranger, and she doesn’t know what she is supposed to do, or say. She puts her hands on her knees and stares down at her feet, and wiggles her toes.

     The men and her mother are all talking, and then the man puts his hands on her hips and pulls her back, closer to him. Erin bites her lips and curls her hands around the cloth of her nightdress.

     Erin’s mother is watching her closely, and she says, “Smile, baby. We’re having fun!”

     Erin tries to smile, and the men all smile back at her, and the one behind her laughs and touches his hand to her back, and her shoulder, and her cheek and the top of her head.

     After a short time, her mother comes over and pulls her off the man’s lap. She holds Erin’s hand and walks her over to one of the other men, and he smiles and bends down to talk to her.

     She remembers him saying something about her dimples, and she tried to smile wider so that he could see them. Her mother’s hand is on her shoulder, fingers digging in, and Erin wants to do what she’s supposed to do. The man touches a spot on her cheek, next to her nose, and says that she has such a cute little freckle.

     Erin at five hasn’t spent a lot of time looking at her face in a mirror, so she doesn’t know what he means. She climbs up onto his lap when he asks, though, and sits there and he wraps his arms around her body and bounces his knees up and down.

     It seems to take a long time for the men to leave. Erin’s tired, and her eyes are drooping, when the last man picks her off his lap and sets her back on the floor. They all say goodbye to her, and she says goodbye back, and smiles when her mother prompts her, and when one of the men bends down and asks for a kiss she gives him one, on the cheek. His beard is scratchy.

     Afterwards, her mother says, “This is a secret, okay, Erin? It’s a special secret with you and your new friends.”

     Naturally, Erin tells her kindergarten teacher a week or so later. The teacher calls her mother, who goes to the school to smooth things over, and then comes home and tells Erin she’s not going to school again, not if she can’t learn to keep her mouth shut.

     She doesn’t go to school for six months, but her ‘new friends’ keep coming over. Sometimes she recognises the men, and sometimes they really are new. She’ll sit on their laps and let them talk to her, and hug her, and she’ll smile at them when her mother reminds her to. It’s always late at night, so she’s always tired.

     Once, she falls asleep on a man’s lap and wakes to find his hands up beneath her nightdress. She freezes, because she’s scared, and confused, and then she gets angry. She pushes his hands away and she jumps off his lap and runs upstairs to hide beneath the covers of her bed.

     Her mother comes up after her. “Don’t be a baby, Erin.”

     She’s not a baby, she knows this, because Teddy’s the baby. She’s the big girl. “I don’t like those friends.”

     “I don’t like being poor, sweetheart. We all have to do things we don’t like.”

     Erin doesn’t understand the correlation. “Can I please just go to sleep now?”

     Her mother makes the face which means she’s angry and she’s disappointed in Erin, but she shrugs and says, “You can do what you like.”

     Erin does want to sleep, but she wants to make sure that the new friends are out of her house first, and so she creeps out of bed and crouches by the bannisters, hanging on and pressing her face between the bars to look downstairs. She watches the men giving her mother money – lots of money – and then going out the door, one by one. When the last one leaves, Erin goes back to bed.

     In the morning her mother is ODed and sprawled unconscious over the kitchen table. Erin runs out into the street and cries in a panic to anyone who will listen. Someone calls an ambulance, and the paramedics call the cops, and Erin and Teddy do their first stretch in CPS custody. Leaving her mother scares Erin so much that when she’s given back to the woman ten months later she goes all meek, and compliant, and does everything her mother says. She’s too scared of being taken away again to argue when her mother drinks, and swears; hits and throws things.

     The visits from the overly friendly men stop after the first time that Erin goes into the system. She’s always felt lucky about that, because she knows how much worse it could have become. She doesn’t like to dwell on it much, but sometimes she uses the experience to feed her empathy when she runs across people like Nadia. She understands, to a certain extent, how their lives could go so wrong.

 ***

The night after they find Erin’s phone in that dank, bare, awful little room, Jay dreams about her.

     He wouldn’t have minded so much if it was a nightmare. It had felt like a nightmare, stepping into that room and thinking about what could have happened to her there. They’d tossed the place, and her phone had been under the mattress. Jay had picked it up and put it in his pocket and then stared around, trying not to imagine Erin trapped in here.

     It’s not a nightmare, though. It’s a dream where she’s all big eyes and soft skin and she’s panting underneath him when he kisses her. It’s the kind of dream that makes Jay wake up frustrated because the dream has stopped – and then his mind clears and he flushes with embarrassment. It’s not the kind of dream, because that’s happened to him _plenty_ of times before. No, he’s upset because it was Erin in his dream, and that’s mortifying and insensitive, given where Erin is right now. He feels like a son of a bitch.

     The blankets are tangled around his hips and he throws them off and goes to shower, trying to think about the work day ahead of him, and steer his thoughts away from everything else.

     The plan is just to drop by the precinct briefly, check in with Voight and then get out on the streets, trying to do something that feels like he’s helping his partner, but Erin calls as he walks upstairs.

     It’s her fake phone, so he answers it with a fake, “Yeah? Babe?”

     “It’s okay,” she hisses, “I’m alone.”

     “Where are you?” Jay asks at once, dropping the pretence.

     “I, uh… I don’t know,” she admits. “There was a bit of a drama on the way here.”

     “What do you mean? Are you okay? What happened?”

     “I’ll explain later, we don’t have much time,” Erin insists. “Can you track my call?”

     “Can you leave the line open?”

     “I think so.”

     “Then yeah, I’ll get Atwater on it.” He starts taking the stairs two at a time, then pauses and says, “Erin?”

     “Mm-hm?”

     “Are you sure you’re okay?”

     “I’m fine, Jay, I swear.”

     “Be careful,” he says.

     “I will. I have to go, but I’ll leave the line open.”

     He whispers, “Bye,” and then he hurtles the rest of the way upstairs and says, “Erin called.” Everyone asks questions at once, so Jay holds up his hands for quiet and passes the phone to Atwater. “Can you trace the call? She doesn’t know where she is but she says she’s okay.”

     “I’m on it,” Atwater promises.

     “Anything else?” Voight asks.

     Jay shakes his head. “She couldn’t say much, but she was alone and she was safe, for now. That’s all I know.”

     Voight turns the corners of his lips down, a mouth-shrug, and nods slowly. “Well all right, then. Let’s get to work on finding out where she is and who she’s with. Any progress on Roland?”

     Antonio’s the one who’s working on that. He says, “I think we’re looking for one Roland Rayez but without a photo ID I can’t say for sure. It’s possible that ‘Roland’ is an alias.”

     “Okay. Antonio, you and me are gonna track down Rayez and have a little chat.” Voight pauses, frowns at Jay and says, “Halstead, don’t you have work to be doing?”

     “Yeah,” Jay realises, snapping back to the present. He’d been standing in the middle of a bullpen like an idiot, too busy worrying about what Erin is doing to move. “I’m going.” He leaves.

 ***

Everyone’s taken good care of Erin since she woke up; the older women who she assumes are madams, the other working girls, even a few young kids have been giving her advice on what to say and how to behave.

     She felt sick, at first, nauseous and dizzy, and they put her on a bed and a young woman pressed wet towels to her forehead. Erin had asked where she was, but it was hard to get information out of anyone. Half of the girls didn’t know anything, and the other half weren’t willing to say. She played a confused, sick junkie, which wasn’t hard, because she was both confused and sick.

     She dozed on and off, and started feeling normal again after a couple of hours, a lot of water and a grilled cheese sandwich that a girl who looked barely teenaged brought her. It takes time, but eventually everyone leaves her alone, and Erin seizes the chance to call Jay. She doesn’t tell him about being drugged, or how scared she is about being here without anyone knowing where she was. She tries to keep her voice steady when she asks him to trace her call.

     It is important to keep the line open, but this phone is her last resort, so Erin doesn’t want to leave it anywhere. She slides it back into the waistband of her jeans instead, and then goes around the room, examining everything. It’s a nice room, with a single double bed in the middle, a built-in wooden wardrobe and a window, which is probably the most helpful thing in there, because it tells Erin that she’s on the second floor of a nice-looking house with a wraparound balcony.

     Behind her, someone opens the door. “Hey, you’re up,” a man’s voice says.

     She turns around and it’s Roland, which doesn’t surprise her. Of course he’d want to check in on his new worker. “What’s this place?”

   “The house where you’ll be working,” he says. He looks past her, out of the window. “There’s a nice view, right?”

     “Sure,” Erin says, “but I don’t want to stay here that long.”

     She’s being too pushy. He frowns at her. “That’s not up to you, remember? You’re working off a debt.”

     Erin goes submissive immediately, trying to undo the mistake she’s made. “Okay, I’m sorry. You just hear bad stories, you know?”

     “This isn’t one of those places,” he assures her, and then, “Come on.”

     She wants to ask where, but he won’t like that. She rephrases. “Isn’t this my room?”

     “No, this is our intakes room,” Roland smiles. “You’re going to settle right in with the other girls now, though. Follow me.”

     She does follow him, out of the door and down the corridor. “Will I be able to shower or something?” It seems like an innocuous enough question for her to be asking.

     “Of course.” Roland looks back at her over his shoulder, and asks, “What’s your name, anyway, darlin’? You never said.”

     _You never asked_ , Erin thinks. She says, “Devin,” and it comes easily off her tongue. She’s been good at lying about her name ever since she was a child, and she works in undercover now, so it’s not a challenge to create a fake story on the fly.

     “Are you from Chicago, Devin? You look like a Western girl to me.”

     “Nope, Chicago born and raised,” she says. “What about you?” Erin tries to sound harmless, high-pitched, like a girl making small talk.

     It works, because Roland chuckles and says, “Nah, I’m new to this city. I like it, though. I like the cold.”

     Erin wonders if this means he comes from a hot place, if the cold is interesting to him because it’s something new. “Once I work off my debt I can go, yeah? I think my boyfriend will miss me if I stay away too long.”

     “Don’t worry about things like that,” Roland says. “You just take each day as it comes and focus on your work. Everything will work out, you’ll see.”

     He shows her through another door, into a room with six bunk beds. There’s another door at the side of the room which is open, and Erin can see a bathroom inside.

     “This is my room?” she guesses.

     “That’s right,” Roland says, and then he closes the door behind him. “I’m just going to need to ask you a favour, now.”

   Erin thinks, _crap_. “What?” She keeps her eyes wide and doesn’t let her hands curl into fists.

     “Just to take off your clothes, if you could.”

     “What?” This time it’s incredulous, startled, a little bit nervous.

     “We have a policy in here about people smuggling in their own drugs. Everything comes from our supply, so I need to make sure you’re not holding.”

     “I’m not,” Erin says, thinking fast. The phone feels hot against her hip. “If I had my own stuff I wouldn’t be here. You don’t need to do a strip search.”

     She’s being too boisterous again. Roland frowns, a little line appearing between his eyebrows.

     “Come on, now,” he encourages. “You’ll need to get used to doing things when people ask, Devin.”

     She’s trying to win these people’s favour; to learn about them. Erin reminds herself of that, and then slowly she moves her hands to the hem of her long-sleeved shirt.

     “You’re sure?” she double checks.

     “Just do it,” he snaps. He’s getting impatient, and nasty.

     Erin pulls the shirt over her head. She closes her eyes and takes a breath and hopes that her team has gotten the trace done, and then she unbuttons her jeans and lowers them to the floor. The phone falls along with them, and for a second, as she steps out of the jeans, Erin thinks Roland might not have seen it.

     He steps forward, bends down and picks it up. Damn. “What’s this?” His tone is low and dangerous.

     Erin bites her lip and feigns innocence. “My phone?”

     “Why is it here?”

     “I didn’t know we weren’t allowed phones. You said you were looking for drugs.”

     “Don’t be a smartass,” he says, and he takes out the sim card and then twists the two halves of the flip phone sharply so that they come apart. “There’s a landline you can use if you need to make a call.”

     “Sorry,” Erin mumbles.

     He jerks his chin towards her, standing in her bra and panties. “Finish.”

     “You want me to keep going?”

     “Yeah, hurry up. There are new clothes on your bunk for you when you’re done.”

     Erin thinks that she should keep in character, bow her head meekly and do as she’s told, but she just can’t. She has to take a deep breath, and remind herself exactly how far she’s come. This? This is nothing, a blip on the radar of obstacles that life has thrown at her. She’s faced worse than this. Erin lifts her chin and reaches behind her to unhook her bra. She shrugs her shoulders to shake it off, lets it drops, and then shoves her panties down and steps to the side. It’s cold. She shivers, and clenches her fists. Her face is blank, her eyes looking somewhere over Roland’s head, but she still sees, peripherally, when he looks her over like she’s a piece of meat.

     “Done?” she asks belligerently.

     “Yeah, for now,” he says. “Put your new clothes on. I’ll take this.” He picks up the pile of clothes and the mangled remains of the phone from the floor and leaves the room.

     The underwear on the bed is pink and frilly and matching, with a push-up bra. It’s absolutely not something Erin would have chosen for herself, but she’s so far beyond caring now. There’s somewhere in her mind below the surface – a place which doesn’t care about what she’s doing, or what other people are seeing, or how stupid she’s feeling – and she’s retreated there now, acting with a blank sort of knowledge that this is what she has to do.

     When she’s dressed in the clothes they’ve set out – cut-off denim skirt and a tank top – she lies on her back on the bunk bed and wonders whether it’s Roland who murders these girls when they make mistakes. How far can she push him without making him snap?

     There has to be evidence somewhere in this house. Erin can find it. Having a goal in mind galvanises her into action, and she jumps up off the bed. There’s a coat hanging from the bunk above hers and she takes it, defiantly, because she’s cold and she doesn’t care who it belongs to. If she wants to survive this, she’s going to have to stop pretending to be so soft.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erin and Jay catch up in the rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a short chapter, but the next bits I wanted to write felt a bit disjointed when I tagged them on after this stuff, and I couldn't find any good way to put it together. 
> 
> Next Chapter: hopefully the drama increases and I stop writing filler, I guess.

The only person living at Roland Rayez’s address is a middle-aged man with four cats and an attractive goldfish aquarium. He’s never heard of Roland, which brings them back to square one. Now they have an ID, but no way to track the man down.

     Everyone resorts to staking out the location of Erin’s last phone call. They stay on the house day and night for a while. Girls go out, and occasionally men go in. It’s easy to pinpoint the weaknesses of a place which is designed to stop people _leaving_.

     They get a photo ID on Rayez, after a while, and two more men, as well as a bulky, broad-jawed woman with steel grey hair who seems to be high on the chain of command.

     After they’ve had long enough to make a plan, Voight tells Jay, “Get in there and let Erin know we’re still working it,” and gives him detailed instructions and several small, electronic bugs, which he’s supposed to pass to Erin.

     They choose a night when there are thick black clouds covering the moon, when Rayez and the grey-haired woman have both left the house and it’s threatening rain. Jay cuts through the padlock on the back gate and slips into the garden.

 ***

Erin’s asleep when she hears it the first time, but she’s on high alert, and so the tiny sound shakes her into awareness and she’s bright-eyed and sitting up in bed when she hears it again. Little pings against the glass of the window. It’s a sound familiar from her youth, which is what makes her think it’s Voight. She gets up and goes to the window, pulling the curtains out of the way so that she can look out.

     “Devin,” one of the girls whispers sleepily, “what’s going on?”

     “Just moths,” Erin says, staring out the window. “It woke me up and I got nervous. Stupid of me. Go back to sleep, okay?”

     “Whatever,” the girl mumbles. She’s one of the younger ones there, and she trusts Erin, which makes it easier.

     Silently, Erin slips through the connecting door into the bathroom and waits to make sure that no one else is awake, or following her in here. Then she leaves and lets the bathroom door swing closed behind her, so that the noise it makes covers the sound of her going out of the bedroom through the other door.

     The back door into the garden is locked but not alarmed. It’s a bolt at the top of the door, and it’s supposed to be high enough to stop them reaching it. Erin climbs onto the dishwasher and leans out perilously over empty space to reach the bolt. She yanks it down and it makes a noise, metal ringing on metal. Erin freezes, but no one comes running. She jumps down to the ground and pushes the sliding door open.

     It’s raining outside, heavily. She leans over the balcony and sees someone’s pale face beneath a tree in the courtyard.

    ***

Jay sees Erin walk down the stairs from the balcony and pause on the path there, just out of the rain. He steps forward, out of the shadow, so that she can see him properly.

     He can tell the moment she recognises him. This grin unfurls across her face and she starts forward, taking the steps down to the courtyard in a rush and splashing barefoot across the puddles which are forming. The rain soaks her hair and her clothes instantly and beads on her eyelashes when she looks up at him.

     “God, it’s good to see you,” Erin says. She’s still smiling, like she can’t stop. “I was starting to think you guys had forgotten about me.”

     “No way,” Jay says. “Who else would make us manly men our coffees in the morning?”

     “Nadia,” Erin suggests, and then she gets serious. “How’s the investigation going?”

     Jay catches her up. “We’ve identified Roland Rayez and Jo Greene. There’s another man who we’re not clear on and a woman with grey hair.”

     “The second man is Costa,” Erin says, “but I’ve never heard his first name. The woman is Pauline something.”

     “Is there anyone else we should be watching?”

     She considers it, with her head tipped on one side. “Roland’s close to one of the girls in here – Caroline Larch. I’d say they were dating but he’s not that exclusive. She gets to come and go more often than the rest of them, though.”

     “Any idea about the murders?”

     “None. No one’s ever mentioned those girls and I can’t bring them up without it seeming suspicious. I’d say have a closer look at Costa, though. He’s the brawn to Roland’s brain.”

     Jay produces the bugs, then, pulling them out of his coat pocket. “Take these,” he says, “and do what you can with them. _Safely._ ”

     “It’s no point being safe if we don’t learn anything from it,” Erin says, her chin jutting out stubbornly.

     “Don’t be an idiot,” Jay tells her. “Voight already wants to pull you out. He thinks you’ve been in for too long.”

     “I can handle this,” she insists. “Tell Voight.”

     Jay rubs his hand over his jaw as he tries to think. “Erin,” he starts, carefully, “you have to know what long-term undercover like this can do to you. Just… keep yourself separate from the persona, okay? Don’t let yourself do something you’ll regret.”

     “I’m not a rookie, Jay,” she snaps. “Just because you do stupid things undercover doesn’t mean that I will.”

     “Don’t bite my head off,” he warns. “Not when I’m just giving you advice. I’ve worked in undercover for longer than you have – just like you’ve worked with Voight for longer than me. I’m not going to reject your Voight advice, even if it makes me feel stupid. Understand?”

     She wilts, a little bit, and says, “I just hate it when everyone’s telling me to be careful. How can I be careful? I have a job to do in there, Jay. I have a responsibility to the victims.”

     He understands that, of course he does. But he _needs_ her to be safe. “Just don’t take it further than you have to.”

     There’s a noise behind them. Someone turns a light on, and Erin whips her head around. Water splatters from her hair. “I have to go,” she says.

     Jay presses the bugs into Erin’s hand, and she holds them close to her chest, away from the rain. “I’ll see you soon,” he tells her.

     “Counting on it,” Erin agrees, and then she hesitates, looking at him. Jay thinks she might hug him, and he moves a little bit closer, but then she turns away and runs out into the rain.

     She pauses, halfway across the courtyard, and turns back to look at him. Her clothes and hair are plastered to her skin, but she smiles, and Jay smiles too, and lifts his hand and ducks his head.

     Erin whips back around and bolts up the stairs.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Erin's first date as a prostitute, and the undercover work is starting to pay off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's long! I'm not sure if it needs any sort of warnings - there's some mature language, but that should be covered in the original rating, right? Anyway, I hope you all enjoy!

It’s only a couple of days later that Roland tells Erin she’s going out for the first time.

     “I have something special planned for you,” he says. “You’re gonna help out a friend of mine. We’re leaving this evening, so go see Pauline and she’ll make you look pretty, okay?”

     “Where are we going?” Erin asks.

     He takes her chin between his fingers, pressing just lightly. “I don’t want to mark you up before this evening,” he says, “but you’d better watch that smart mouth of yours, understand? You’re not as special after the first time, so don’t think I won’t hurt you.”

     “I’m not a virgin,” Erin says.

     He laughs, and his fingers dig in harder. Now it’s starting to hurt. “I never said you were, sweetheart, but you’re new. New is exciting.”

     Erin wrenches her face out of his grip. “You wouldn’t hurt anyone. Caroline says so.”

     Roland takes a sharp breath, like he’s composing myself. “Stop talking to me like you’re my equal,” he says. “You’re a whore, understand? Now go see Pauline. Get out of my face so I don’t hit you and cost myself the cash.”

     “All right,” Erin says bitterly.

     He calls out when she’s at the door. “Devin?”

     “Yes?”

     “If you don’t believe I’ll hurt people who disrespect me, then maybe you should talk to Costa. Caroline doesn’t know everything around here.”

     Erin shrugs, looks down at her feet and leaves the room. Inside, she’s glowing. This is exactly the opportunity she’s been waiting for.

    

She finds Costa before she finds Pauline. He’s leaning against the wall in the hallway, digging through his mouth with a toothpick.

     “Costa?” Erin asks, making her voice shy and her eyes big.

     He grunts, and then pulls a sliver of meat out with the toothpick and frowns at it.

     “Roland says that bad things happen to people who disrespect him.”

     “Roland’s always right,” Costa mumbles.

     “Would he hurt me?”

     Costa looks up and stares at her. He seems to see some sort of opportunity, because he says darkly, “You might get _killed_ if you don’t do what Roland tells you. I know. Seen it done before. So you’d better do exactly what he says, and also what I says, because Roland and I, we’re tight.” He holds up one massive fist. “Like this. So if I want something, you should give it to me, else I have to hurt you.”

    Erin shrinks back, a little bit. “You haven’t ever killed anybody.”

     “I have,” he says. “Now piss off. You’re supposed to see Pauline, not get all scared about what Roland’s gonna do to you. Just behave and you won’t have nothing to worry about.”

    She turns and leaves, keeping her shoulders hunched and her steps fast, mimicking fear.

     Pauline reminds Erin of an aunt she once had – a nurse, all loud voiced discipline. “Blink,” she says, holding the mascara brush in her hand.

     Erin blinks. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do tonight.”

     “You’ve had sex before, haven’t you? Blink.”

     Erin blinks. “Yeah, but not with a total stranger.”

     “Pretend it’s your boyfriend.” Pauline puts the brush down and picks up the lipstick.

     “I don’t want to think about him. God knows what he’d do to me if he found out what I was doing…”

     “Stop talking and let me do this,” Pauline says. She leans forward and paints Erin’s lips, and then she says, “They’ll probably give you something to make it easier. Before, or after maybe.”

     That makes Erin tense up. She’s been offered drugs before, at the house, but she’s never actually taken them. She’s good at pretending, though. She’s seen it – and experienced it – enough. She was tempted, once or twice, but she’s beyond drugs now, she keeps telling herself. She has a job and a partner and a father figure whose faith in her means something. She doesn’t need any artificial happiness, especially not when it could screw this whole thing up.

     “You don’t look too bad,” Pauline says, finishing up. She jerks her head towards the wardrobe. “There’s a dress for you in there – the black one – so put it on and then go show Roland.”

     It’s a tube dress, short and tight and strapless. Erin calls, “Are you gonna give me a bra for this?”

     Pauline snorts. “You think you’ll need one?”

     Point taken. Erin puts on the dress.

 ***

The conversation about the night’s events gets caught on several bugs across the house. At one stage, it seems like half of the girls in there are talking about it.

     It takes a little while for them to learn that Erin is going. Jay’s not there, but Atwater hears her going into Roland’s office to model a dress for him. He alerts the rest of them, and they get ready to track the van with tonight’s shipment of girls.

     “What did Roland say about her?” Jay asks when he gets back.

     “Nothing,” Atwater says, flicking his tongue over his lips and avoiding Jay’s eyes.

     “Was it bad?”

     “It wasn’t polite,” Atwater eventually admits.

     Jay clenches his fists. “The bastard,” he says evenly.

     Antonio comes up behind him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter, Halstead,” he says. “All we need to do tonight is learn what she knows and make sure nothing bad happens to her. She’ll be out before you know it.”

     Jay hopes so, he really does. He’s been so tense for the past few weeks, and he’s hardly slept. He’s exhausted and angry and anxious and it’s a terrible combination. He just wants his partner back so everything can get back to normal.

 ***

Erin trips up the stairs of the apartment and feels one of the other girls grab her arm, steadying her.

     “Go slow,” the girl murmurs – woman, really, she’s about Erin’s age. “Don’t drink too much or you’ll never make it anywhere in those heels.”

     “Okay,” Erin agrees, and then Roland’s behind her, ushering her forward.

     “Devin,” he says, “this is Tigger.”

     Tigger interrupts, and says, “Mitch,” with a sideways look at Roland.

     “He’s my brother’s son,” Roland continues without a pause, “so you’re gonna show him a real good time, okay?”

     “Sure,” Erin says, but she’s staring at Tigger with wide eyes. He’s a teenager – a kid with bum fluff and pimples on his face. God, she hopes he’s eighteen. He looks nothing like Roland – pale where Roland is dark, tall and skinny where Roland is shorter and slender – and she thinks maybe he’s not a biological nephew.

     “I’ll leave you two to it,” Roland says, and he puts Erin’s hand in Tigger’s.

     Tigger seems a little bit embarrassed. “This was my dad’s idea,” he mumbles, but then he stares shamelessly at Erin’s breasts.

     There’s a chair in the corner, and Tigger tugs her over to it. He sits, sprawling backwards on the armchair, and pulls her down to sit on his lap. Erin tries to smile, and flirt. She feels Roland’s eyes on her back, and so she puts a hand on Tigger’s shoulder and laughs when he tries to joke.

     He kisses her, after a little while, and she closes her eyes and pretends it’s like any other kiss she’s had, not with some kid in a room full of smoke and prostitutes. It’s not like this is the worst place she’s ever been, she tells herself firmly.

     Tigger gets one of his friends to grab them some beers, and some shots, and Erin drinks. She’s hoping it will help her loosen up and play the part, and after a while it starts to work. She’s feeling pleasantly buzzed, and her head is light, and she’s able to lean in and kiss Tigger again as if it’s something she wants to be doing. She giggles, and smiles, and puts her hand on his thigh. His hand is on her waist, creeping lower.

     “Why don’t we take this somewhere more private?” he asks, his nose at her ear. He kisses her neck and Erin closes her eyes again, tries to think.

     Someone grabs her arm. It’s fast and possessive. They yank her up, off Tigger’s lap, and there’s another mouth on hers, warm and hard and tasting of alcohol – or maybe that’s her. Erin flicks her eyes open and the person pulls away from her and smirks and it’s… _Jay?!_

     “Find someone else, kid,” Jay says, his eyes shining with satisfaction, his face flushed with alcohol and the heat of the room.

     Tigger makes some kind of feeble protest, but Jay’s kissing Erin again, hand in her hair, and then he pushes her with him towards the stairs.

     She stumbles going up them, laughs and falls against him, only partly playing. He wraps an arm around her chest and hauls her back onto her feet, then puts his arm around her waist the rest of the way up.

     Costa is waiting at the top of the stairs, so Jay kisses her again. He wraps his fingers around her chin to pull her face upwards and Erin fists her hands in his shirt. They stumble together through the door of a room and Jay slams it shut behind them.

     This is when they should stop kissing, Erin thinks, and talk. Neither of them makes any move apart, though. They’re still kissing. Jay’s teeth touch her lower lip and then they’re stumbling backwards, onto the bed, and his hand is moving down her neck and onto her bare shoulder.

     Somehow – Erin doesn’t know how – her partner is sitting back against the headrest and she’s on his lap, kissing him with her hands on his face. She manages to kick off one of the stupid heels, but the other one stays put, her leg sprawled out across the white bedspread. Straddling Jay’s lap pushes her dress up her hips, and Jay puts his hands there, hiking it up further.

     They should stop. They’re both drunk, and she has no idea what Jay might have taken. What is he doing here? It’s such a relief to see his face – they both fumble to unbutton his shirt, their fingers bumping together clumsily. Erin tips forward a little bit; catches herself with a hand on his shoulder. They’re kissing again, and she can’t stop to breathe, or think, or take off her stupid shoe, which is driving her insane. Jay runs a hand up her side and hooks a finger into the top of her dress.

     Behind them, someone throws the door open. It clangs against the wall with a bang.

     They break apart instantly, and Jay sits up and bends his legs, so that Erin is caught between his knees and his chest. She presses her face into his shoulder.

     He yells, “Get the fuck out! I’ll pay when I’m done!”

     Someone says, “Sorry,” and closes the door.

     Erin lifts up her head and stares at Jay. He’s breathing fast. He tips her off his lap and goes to the door, pressing his ear to it. Then he looks up and shakes his head. There’s no one outside.

     Erin says, “Lock it.”

     He locks the door. “Erin,” he starts carefully, “I’m sorry.”

     “Let’s not talk about it right now,” she dismisses. “What are you doing here?”

     “Saving you from Mitchell the Wonder Boy, apparently.”

     “Who?”

     “The kid you were kissing down there.”

     “Oh.” She takes a second to think. “Tigger.”

     “What kind of a name is Tigger? I thought it was Mitch.”

     Erin shakes her head and lifts up one hand to stall the conversation. With the other hand, she pulls her dress back down as far as it will go. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

     “I’ve been undercover almost as long as you have,” Jay says. “Didn’t you notice I was doing weird hours? I stopped letting you come over to my place.”

     “Well yeah,” Erin nods, “but I thought that was because… I don’t know. It was getting too complicated for you, or something.”

     “Don’t be stupid,” he laughs. “That wasn’t complicated. _This_ is complicated.”

     “Does Voight know you’re here?”

     “Of course. We wanted to check in with you and also make sure you didn’t end up having to do anything tonight.”

     “Except for you,” Erin says wryly. He doesn’t get it. She explains, “I ended up having to do you.”

     “That was just a bit of heavy petting,” Jay corrects. “It doesn’t count. Anyway, you can stay in here for as long as you want and I’ll knock you around a bit afterwards, if you want, so that they don’t try and send you off with anyone else.”

     Erin nods. Jay’s hair is messy where her fingers were combing through it. “They’ve checked in on us once – it shouldn’t happen again.”

     “Okay,” he says. With a sigh, he comes and sits down next to her on the bed. He examines his hands ruefully. “I’ve had too much to drink.”

     “Me too,” Erin tells him.

     “I almost feel bad for taking you away from Tigger.”

     She laughs. “You’re more fun anyway.”

     They sit for a little while. Both of them are still a bit drunk, and a bit shocked.

     “I think Costa killed them,” Erin says eventually. “He gave me about two thirds of a confession.”

     “He’s dangerous,” Jay says. “We’ve IDed him as Bobby Costa – he was tried for attempted murder once before but got out on a technicality.”

     “He scares me,” Erin admits, very quietly.

     There are a few more minutes of silence. Jay reaches out and touches her hand, resting on her leg. He laces their fingers together. It’s solidarity, mostly, but maybe a little bit more, Erin thinks when she looks up at him. His eyes are very bright.

     “We should talk about what happened, huh,” she says.

     “I think so,” Jay agrees.

     Erin sighs and looks down at her legs. She’s tired, and her head is throbbing, and she feels faintly nauseous. “Can we do it later?”

     “Of course,” her partner tells her, unexpectedly gently. “You have other things to think about now.”

     “Exactly,” she says. She _does_ have other things to think about – so why does she keep replaying the events of the evening pointlessly in her head?

 

They spend another half an hour sitting in the room and then Erin has a cat nap on the bed, curled on her side. She’s exhausted, and it’s easier to sleep when she knows her partner has her back.

     Jay shakes her awake and she sits up groggily. “How long was I asleep?”

     “About fifteen minutes,” he says. “We should probably get ready to go.” From his pocket, he takes a phone. It’s another cheap flip phone; a burner cell. “Take this. I want you to have something for emergencies.”

     Erin stands up and tugs her dress down. “Okay,” she says. She searches for her shoes, which she tossed somewhere by the door. When she finds one, she smashes the heel against the headboard of the bed until it breaks off.

     “Where do you want me to hit you?” Jay asks.

     “My face, I guess,” she says. “Make it obvious. Try not to break anything.”

     He punches her in the mouth. It’s not as hard as she knows it could be, but it hurts like hell. Her head snaps around and her lip splits.

     “Ouch,” she says, touching it gingerly. It starts to swell up fast, making her voice thick and distorted. “Well done, I guess.”

     “Enough blood?” he asks.

     “You should grab my shoulder, or something, see if you can get a bruise,” Erin says.

     “How fast do you bruise?”

     She shrugs, and Jay shrugs too, and puts his hand on her shoulder where it meets her neck. His fingers dig in just above her collarbone, and along the back of her shoulder, and he pushes down hard. Erin cringes, tries not to cry out, and goes down to her knees, forced down by the pressure. Jay leans on her and she makes a tiny noise.

     “Sorry,” he says.

     “It’s fine,” she manages through gritted teeth.

     He lets her up after a minute, and she moves her shoulder and arm. It hurts, but it’s not stiff or swollen.

     “You have some nice finger-marks,” Jay says, “and you’re red, so that should look good.”

     “Last touch?” she says, standing up.

     He slaps her across the face, reddening her cheek. “Good?”

     “Good enough,” Erin says. They go to the door.

     “You’d better leave first,” she tells Jay, “and get out before they see what you did to me.”

     “Good luck,” he says.

     “I’ll see you soon,” she promises.

     He leaves. Erin waits a minute or two, and then gets herself ready. She digs a fingernail into the soft skin at the base of her nose, pushing until her eyes start to water and her nose starts to run. Then she runs her hand through her messy hair, pulling at all the snags. Tears run down her cheeks.

     Wet-eyed and sniffing miserably, she stumbles out of the room, taking a few hitching breaths, as if she’s been crying.

     Costa is still standing guard at the top of the stairs. He snaps to attention when he sees her and storms over to her. “What happened?”

     Erin just lowers her head and brings on a renewed storm of sobs.

     Costa rolls his eyes and grabs her arm. “Come on, let’s get you out of here. How badly are you hurt?”

     “Everywhere,” she whimpers. She leans on him heavily as they limp down the stairs. He puts his hand around her waist, seizing the chance to cop a feel while he does it, and Erin feels a bruise on her hip when he touches it. She winces away. “Ow.”

     “Just walk,” he growls.

     She wonders when Jay was holding her hips hard enough to bruise. She doesn’t even remember any pain, she’d been so distracted. They _really_ need to talk about that some time.

     Costa gets her into the minivan and she’s so exhausted that she slumps down on a seat and falls asleep. She wakes up a little when the other girls start to come in.

     “What happened?” someone asks. There’s a hand on Erin’s shoulder, feather-light. “You have an awful bruise.”

     She forces her eyes open. They’re gummy with sleep and tears.

     Roland pushes the girl talking to Erin out of the way and leans over her. “Are you all right, Devin?”

     She nods slowly.

     “Good,” he says. “We’ll talk about this more when we get back.”

     Everyone else gets out of the minivan back at the house, but Costa holds out his arm to stop Erin. “Not you,” he grunts. “Roland wants to talk to you.” He leers at her, and she shrinks back.

     Roland climbs into the van when everyone else is out. He sits down opposite Erin. “I hear Tigger didn’t have a great time tonight.”

     “Sorry,” Erin says. “Someone else grabbed me.”

     “You’re supposed to say _no_.”

     “I didn’t know I was allowed to say no anymore,” she says.

     Roland narrows his eyes and stares at her, a hard, long stare. Suddenly his hand flashes out and he grabs her hair, pulling her out of her seat towards him. Erin yells with pain.

     “You’ve got such a smart mouth,” Roland says, pulling her out of the van, “and you don’t even serve the client I ask you to serve. Tell me what good you are to me.”

     “I’m sorry!” she gasps. “It won’t happen again, I’m sorry!”

     “Nah, sorry isn’t good enough,” he says. “You need to _feel_ to learn.”

     He drags her through the garage and down the stairs at the back, into the basement. Erin closes her eyes. Shit, shit, shit.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything's getting serious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for violence, not super graphic, but violent nontheless.

Roland gives her a shove when they’re halfway down the stairs and Erin tumbles, because she’s dizzy and exhausted and wearing the world’s stupidest pair of part-broken heels. It’s hard to tell exactly which part of her hits the stairs. She lies on her back when she reaches the bottom and tries to localise her pain.

     Her shoulder hurts like a bitch, but that’s from Jay. Her lip, too. There’s a dull throbbing at the base of her skull that worries her, though. That’s new. The sharp, bone-deep pain in her forearm and elbow is new too. Apart from her head, she just feels winded. One of her knees hurts.

     “Get up,” Roland says. He’s reached the bottom of the stairs.

     It’s not hard for Erin to force tears. She shakes her head and sniffs and sobs.

     “Get up,” the man says again.

     “Please,” Erin begs, “please, I’m sorry, I’ll do better next time.”

     “Yeah, you will,” Roland agrees. He gestures to Costa.

     The big man grabs Erin’s hand and yanks up, sharply. She screams out, because there’s something wrong with that arm. Her elbow feels stiff and unwieldy and there’s a pain which she thinks might be a fracture.

     “Come on,” Costa grunts. He drags her over to the far wall, to the radiator, where he forces her down to her knees. Erin’s sobbing openly now, and it’s not a pretence. She’s scared. She’s screwed up.

     Roland appears behind Costa and produces handcuffs out of nowhere. He crouches down and snaps the cuffs around Erin’s wrist and the bar of the radiator. He doesn’t look at her face, just stands up again, looming over her. “Are you going to say anything now, whore?”

     Numbly, Erin shakes her head. She cradles her injured arm close to her body.

     “Good,” Roland says, and then he kicks her, without warning, in her chest and stomach.

     Erin cries out and curls up, bringing her knees in, lying sideways on the floor and tucking her body into a ball in an effort to protect herself. The arm cuffed to the radiator is twisted above her head by the angle. Roland keeps kicking, and Costa laughs – actually gives a genuine laugh – and joins in. The man is a psychopath, Erin thinks. They’re both psychopaths.

     She can feel the stupid tube dress both riding up and sliding down, but there’s not enough shame left in her to care anymore.

     Eventually, they both lay off. “We’ll be back down later,” Roland promises. “Maybe I’ll even bring a few customers to see you down here.”

     “See you soon,” Costa smirks when he leaves.

     Roland waits an extra minute or so, just watching her. There’s make-up and blood streaked on her face and tears soaking into the concrete ground beneath her. “Devin,” he says.

     Erin makes an effort to look up. “I’m sorry,” she says again.

     “I know,” Roland tells her. “I want to think this is the only time we’re going to be down here, right?”

     “Please don’t kill me,” she begs.

     “See, this is what happens,” he muses. “They act so tough, all backchat and sarcasm, and then you get them down here and they’re just crying little girls underneath, you know? It’s like you never grew up.”

     Erin thinks about the little girls this man has murdered. It makes her feel braver. “I don’t want to die,” she says.

     He keeps talking as if he hasn’t heard her. “You’re all the same, really. All you really want is a man to take care of you. Most of my girls, their boyfriends pimped them out, or their daddies. They’re lucky to have me. I only hurt them when I _have_ to. When they know too much, or they act up, and don’t do what they’re told.” He leans in. “Like you, Devin.”

     “I can do what I’m told,” she sniffs.

     “Well good, because I’ve had plenty of girls down here, and not all of them _walked_ out, if you know what I’m saying. You think about that.”

     When he leaves, Erin stares at the concrete through eyes that are blurred and sliding with tears. She breathes deep, through the pain, and tries to find something to hold on to. Some kind of strength to get her through.

     Erin’s resilient, she knows that. She’s had to be. Life hasn’t exactly given her any choice. She’s had hardships thrown at her since she was born, premature and fighting for life, thanks to her mother’s nicotine addiction. When she moved in with Voight, things were safer, sure, but not easier. He made her work hard for everything – study hard, train hard, always thinking, always planning.

     It’s supposed to help her in a situation just like this. Erin shuts down the pain, and the fear, and blinks away the tears. She grits her teeth and uncurls, her cuffed arm still raised above her, so that she can look around the basement. It’s a big room with concrete walls and floor. There are broken bookshelves, old bed frames and other junk items lying around the room. On the wall opposite Erin, behind the stairs, is the water heater.

     The handcuffs aren’t what she’s worried about. She has about four bobby pins in the elaborate hairstyle that Pauline created for her, and Erin went through a lock-picking stage in her early teens. She still remembers most of it, and handcuffs were, ironically, both the simplest – only one bobby pin needed – and the ones that she practiced on the most.

     What bothers Erin is that there seems to be only one door into the basement, and it’s at the top of the stairs. She doesn’t want to have to drag herself back up those damn stairs. They’re steeper than they look, and she’s going to be slow and weak, assuming she can actually stand at all.

     The best option, then, is to call for help. She has the phone Jay gave her shoved down the side of her dress, where the fabric is the tightest. She didn’t want to risk it falling out. The problem now is that Erin is lying on her left side, with her left arm cuffed to the radiator above her head. Her right arm is tucked against her side and every time she tries to move it, pain radiates through her entire body and the arm goes stiff and useless. The phone is tucked down the left side of her dress, which she knows because she can feel it, pressing hard against her hip.

     So all Erin has to do is find a way to wriggle her broken right arm around to her left side, into her dress somehow and fish out the phone that she’s lying on. Piece of cake.

***

Jay leaves the party in a hurry, gets the stink eye from Tigger on the way out, and walks four blocks to Voight’s car.

     “Well?” the boss asks bluntly as soon as Jay gets inside.

     He’s tired, drunk and cold, but he relays the night’s events with as much accuracy as he can. Through omission, Jay manages to make it sound as if he and Erin started talking as soon as they got into the bedroom.

     “And you didn’t have any trouble getting out?” Voight checks.

   Jay shakes his head. “They were a little bit pissed that I took Erin upstairs – I think she was supposed to be a present for someone’s kid or something – but I brought extra product for them as my ticket into the party, so they weren’t too annoyed. I’ve been a solid dealer for the past three weeks, so they don’t have any reason not to trust me.”

     “All right,” Voight says, accepting that.

     “When can we pull Erin out?” Jay asks.

     “I’d like to get a photo ID on Costa and Rayez from the little girl at the hospital first,” Voight says. “Show her photos of those other two, as well – Greene and that woman. If she can ID them then we can bring them in and match DNA and prints with what we found on the bodies.”

     “It was one partial print,” Jay objects. “We can’t do much with that. The DNA was semen, which could be from anyone.”

     “It’s a start,” Voight snaps. He’s been testy for a while. Having two of his officers doing long-term undercover work at once puts him on edge, Jay thinks. “Did you give Erin the phone?”

     “Yeah.”

     “So go home, sober up and maybe take a bath, because you smell like a damn brewery. In the morning I’ll send Antonio and Atwater to interview Leonor.”

     “Do you want to feign some kind of arrest with me?”

     The older man shakes his head. “No point in trying to keep this character alive. Just drop off the grid.”

     “In that case,” Jay says, “can I go to see Leonor? I interviewed her with Erin, and it might help to have a familiar face. She seemed really scared of those guys, and I don’t want her getting intimidated out of doing a good ID.”

     Voight gives Jay a long look, which is probably because Jay is implying that his coworkers can’t put the girl at ease well enough, but he doesn’t care what he’s implying. He just wants Erin out of that damn house.

     Eventually, Voight nods. “All right,” he rasps. “So go and get some sleep now. You’d better leave early. I’ll drive you back to work.”

     “Thanks,” Jay says.

     They’ve gone a little way in silence when Voight says, “And no one checked up on you and Erin?”

     “Pardon?”

     “No one came in to make sure you were doing what you were supposed to be doing?”

     “Oh.” Jay pauses. “No. I mean, they didn’t actually get _in_ , because we locked the door. But maybe they listened outside or something. We were talking really quietly though. But we, um, didn’t even think to keep pretending inside the room, in case someone checked.” He feels like he’s saying the wrong thing, but his brain just really isn’t functioning at top level right now.

     “Hm,” says Voight. It’s an ominous syllable.

     The rest of the ride passes without any more interrogation, which is a relief, because Jay doesn’t think he can take it.

 

It takes ages for him to finally get home, because there’s paperwork to fill out while the events of the night are still fresh. Jay’s thrilled when he can finally leave and drive home.

     It’s warm inside, so he shucks his jacket by the door and heads straight for the bathroom. He dumps his keys and phone on the kitchen counter when he walks past and then starts to take off his shirt, longing for a shower.

***

The handcuff is cutting into Erin’s wrist. She’s losing feeling in her left hand.

     She’s tried to squirm over onto her back, but the wall is pressed up hard against her, and she can’t rotate her arm enough to make it. Twice, too, she’s tried to reach her right arm down to the hem of her dress. Her elbow won’t straighten enough for her to make it, no matter how much she pushes through the pain.

     Erin lifts her head, and tries to lift her torso too. The pressure it puts on her wrist and injured torso is incredible, and she gives up and slumps back down with a cry of pain.

     Okay. She moves her right arm again, biting down on the gasp of pain, and lifts it up, fumbling it down through the top of her tube dress. The fabric is tight, hard to push through, but Erin keeps going. Her arm is agonising. The pain makes her want to throw up. Everything starts spinning, and honestly she’s been light-headed and dizzy for a while now. She tries to concentrate. Her fingers fumble at her stomach, and she wriggles a little bit on the floor, trying to push the phone higher, past her hip. She forces her arm to reach lower, and she lifts her hip, pressing her face into the concrete floor with the effort. Her fingers brush the phone, and then she tugs it higher, and finally her hand closes around it.

     Erin pulls the phone out of the top of her dress and slumps in relief. Her cuffed wrist burns but she hugs her right arm back close to her body and fumbles the phone open, speed-dialling Jay.

***

Warm water cascades over Jay’s face and he tips his head back further, rubbing his hands through his hair and over his shoulders. It’s a relief to finally be able to wash the night away from him. This is possibly the best shower of his life.

***

Erin says, “Shit,” when the call goes straight to voicemail. Then she realises that Jay’s voicemail is recording this, and so she adds a few more choice swearwords and then says, “Damnit, Jay, pick up. I need you guys to get over here _now_.”

     She hangs up and then dials again, because at least that _feels_ productive. The second time, she doesn’t even get to voicemail.

***

Jay gets out of the shower, scrubs a towel through his hair and then wraps it around his hips. It’s more out of habit than modesty, because there’s no one else in the house. He strolls down the hallway and picks his phone up off the kitchen counter.

     The screen is black and dead. No battery. Jay clicks his tongue against his teeth and goes searching for his charger.

***

Erin thinks she’s starting to black out when she hears voices and footfalls on the stairs.

     Honestly, it would be a relief. She’s kept herself conscious this far through sheer stubbornness, but the pain is getting to her. Maybe she wants to pass out, if this is Roland coming back for another go.

     The voices rouse her just enough for her to dial Jay’s number again, and then slide the phone under the radiator, so that no one else will be able to see it.

     It is Roland. He’s giving instructions to someone at the top of the stairs that Erin can’t see, but when he stops talking they close the door.

     “How are you feeling?” Roland asks. He’s brought her water.

     “Sore,” Erin croaks. “Please can I go back upstairs.”

     “When I think you’ve learnt your lesson,” Roland says, “sure.” He lifts her head and tips the water bottle to her mouth, helping her drink.

     Erin swallows greedily. She doesn’t know when he’ll bring her water again.

***

Jay’s phone buzzes when it switches back on, and almost immediately buzzes again, the screen lighting up. He glances at the screen. Erin’s new burner cell is calling him.

     Jay answers the phone and almost says hi, but someone else speaks first. A man.

     “Don’t drink too much,” he says. The voice is faint and distorted.

     “My head hurts.” The sound quality isn’t much clearer, but Jay knows the second voice is Erin. There’s a weird echo layering over everything.

     Jay puts his phone on speaker and starts searching for the landline. He needs to get in touch with Voight, but he can’t hang up this call. It doesn’t sound like Erin’s going to be able to call him back.

     “Let me see,” the man says on the phone. There’s a pause, and then, “Oh, yes. You’re bleeding.” The guy sounds calm when he says it. Jay wants to reach through the phone and throttle him.

     “Can’t I go upstairs and sleep?” Erin pleads.

     “We’re not done yet, so stop asking,” the man warns her. “I’m starting to get bored of you asking. I have something else in mind.”

     There’s silence. Jay trips over the vacuum cleaner, catches himself, checks the kitchen. No landline. He staggers into the lounge room and starts to search between the couch cushions, fumbling with desperation.

     Erin says, “What do you want?” Her voice is quiet. Hopeless.

     “Told you to keep your mouth shut,” the man says.

     Silence again, and then Erin says, “Please don’t.”

     Jay clenches his teeth together. He finds the landline beneath the couch and starts dialling Voight. His fingers are shaking. Carefully, he carries his cell into the kitchen and sets it down on the counter.

     “Please, don’t.” Erin’s voice again. “Please.”

     Jay calls Voight from the other room and speaks as quietly as he can. He doesn’t want anyone on the other end of Erin’s call to hear him.

     “Halstead?” Voight asks. “I told you to go home.”

     “I am home,” Jay says. “There’s no time to explain, okay? We have to go get Erin. Now.”

     To his credit, Voight doesn’t argue or ask questions. He says, “I’ll meet you there,” and hangs up.

     Jay dashes back into the kitchen and grabs his other phone. It’s gone quiet again, but while he’s getting into the car he hears Erin.

     “Stop,” she says, and then, “ _Don’t!”_ Her voice is high-pitched, shrill with pain and tension.

     There’s a sharp sound, like a slap. Jay mutes his end of the call, which really, he should have done earlier. He starts the car and turns on the lights and stomps the accelerator down to the floor.

     The man on the phone makes a low, harsh noise. “That’s better,” he says. “It’s more fun when I don’t have to hear you talking.”

     Jay shoots through a red light as if it wasn’t there. He flicks his eyes across his mirrors and skids around a turn with the handbrake yanked up.

     There’s nothing on the other end of the phone now but breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooh, a cliffhanger! Those are always fun, right? ;)
> 
> I reckon there's about one or two chapters left in the story now, depending on how long I want them to be. So expect at least one more update, hopefully sometime in the next two weeks. 
> 
> I hope you're all still enjoying! Even if canon on the show tried to kill Linstead dreams ugh.


	9. Chapter 9

Roland has his face in her neck and his hand down the front of her dress. It’s distracting him. Erin takes a fast breath and twists her head forward, biting down hard on his ear. Blood floods her mouth and she presses her teeth together harder.

     The man yells, shoves at her, pulls himself away. At the same moment, something bangs upstairs. Loudly.

     There’s a thump on the basement door. “Fucking cops, Roland!” Costa calls down.

     “You little bitch,” Roland says, bringing his hand up to his bleeding ear. He stares at his fingers in astonishment. He doesn’t even sound angry, just wondering. He genuinely can’t believe that she hurt him.

     “Not so brave when we fight back, are you?” Erin spits. There’s blood on her lips. “I’m not one of the children you’ve murdered, Roland.”

     He stares at her, starts to piece it together. “Who _are_ you?”

     There are gunshots above them. Erin can hear voices. If she strains, she imagines she can pick out Voight’s voice from the bunch, maybe Jay’s too.

     “Right, that’s it,” Roland says. He grabs Erin under her arms and drags her to her feet. Her left arm is yanked back by the cuff. The man flips out a knife and jabs it beneath her chin. “You’re going to do exactly what I say.”

     Erin’s actually struggling not to pass out and fall straight into the knife. She blinks, rapidly, and curls her left fist around the thin chain of the cuffs. The metal ring rattles against the radiator.

     The basement door is flung open, smashing against the wall, and Antonio and Voight start halfway down the stairs, take in the situation and stop, guns drawn.

     “Drop the knife!” Voight yells.

     “You’ve got nowhere to go,” Antonio adds.

     “You’re gonna let me go right past you,” Roland insists. “I’ve got leverage here. Is she one of you? A cop? You don’t want me to kill her.”

     Erin’s vision is going blurry and her legs are shaking. She sees Voight hesitate and knows that right now, while she’s standing in front of Roland, he can’t make the shot. So she does the only thing she can think of doing and collapses forward, onto the knife and out of Voight’s way.

     She’s bleeding on the floor but it doesn’t feel too bad. Before she passes out, she hears the shot.

 

It’s a quick trip into unconsciousness. Erin thinks she’s only out for a few seconds, because she comes to and Roland’s body is slumped on top of her. She’s covered in his blood.

     “Erin,” Voight is saying. He heaves the man off her.

     She looks at his face and tries to say something but she’s dizzy as hell. Her headache peaks so she rolls over onto her front and vomits on the floor. Voight takes her shoulders and rolls her back again, and then Erin passes out for the second time.

***

Jay dashes into the house, past Billy Costa, standing there with his hands cuffed behind his back and a sorry look on his face, and down the basement steps.

     At first, all he can see at the bottom is Voight crouching over a pool of blood and crumpled bodies. Jay nearly loses it, then, but he manages to keep himself calm long enough to stow his weapon and stop beside Voight.

     Roland Rayez is sprawled on the ground. He’s dead. Jay spares barely a second to look at the man’s corpse. He doesn’t care.

   Erin is beside Rayez, and her eyes are closed but she’s breathing. She’s covered in blood and Jay takes a minute to scan her for injuries; stab wounds, gunshots, anything. There’s a nick in her throat which is bleeding sluggishly, but the rest of it seems to have come from Rayez.

     Voight has his hand on Erin’s throat, taking her pulse. “Get upstairs, secure the house,” he says without looking at Jay. “Then you can come back down here and ride with her in the ambulance.”

     It’s a rare gift, and Jay’s going to take it. He turns around and heads for the stairs. The quicker he finishes up, the quicker he can get back to stay with his partner.

***

Erin drifts in and out of consciousness when the paramedics carry her up the basement stairs, and when they load her into the ambulance. She comes back fully when she’s in the back and sees Jay sitting next to her.

     “Hi,” he says.

     She’s not ready for speaking. Not yet. She takes a breath and there’s pain everywhere. It doesn’t bother her very much. Seeing the interior of an ambulance with her partner by her side is incredibly comforting.

 

When they get to the hospital, Erin decides she has enough energy for a question.

     She asks, “Surgery?”

     Jay, who’s good at understanding Erin even when she’s drunk or in a daze of pain and painkillers, says, “You don’t need any. Stitches for the back of your head, though, and the cut on your chin. You have concussion and your right arm is broken. Subluxed radial head, too, but they said that’s easy to fix, which is lucky, because I have no idea what the hell it means.”

     Erin doesn’t really understand either, but she’ll work it out later. She tries another word. “Thanks.”

     “I’m just glad you called me,” Jay says. “We got all four of them, by the way. They’re the biggest ringleaders we can find, for now. Pauline’s clammed up and she’s just sitting in interrogation, but Jo Greene and Billy Costa are singing like birds. They’re trying to pin everything on Rayez, of course, now he’s dead, but we think Costa at least will go down for murder. Leonor’s going to ID them all. Oh, and the other girls are all safe.”

     That’s enough information for Erin to relax. She closes her eyes again.

***

Jay falls asleep in one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs and has wild, vivid nightmares. He jerks awake after each one, sweating and shaking, and watches Erin breathing for a while.

     They’ve come in and stitched her up. He can’t see the ones in her head, but under her chin there are about seven neat black stitches. There’s a butterfly bandage on her cheekbone and they’ve popped her elbow back into place and put her right forearm in a cast. Her face is bruised and there’s still blood in her hair. They’re going to test Rayez’s corpse, Jay hears, to make sure he doesn’t have any blood-transmissible diseases that could have been passed on to Erin.

     It seems like a lot of work, to catch one man and his three lowbrow accomplices. Jay feels exhausted just thinking about it all, although that might be because he needs to sleep.

     The worst part is that this wasn’t even a big group. Forced prostitution, human trafficking – the whole nine yards – it happens all over the country; the world, even, and it drives Jay insane, that they try _so hard_ to make a difference and all they can do is shoot one measly man.

     He’s glad Rayez is dead, because if Voight hadn’t shot him, Jay might have.

***

Erin sleeps for a long time. There’s sunlight streaming through the window when she finally wakes up.

     She feels – not refreshed, exactly, but more awake and aware than she has been in a while, even with the painkillers hazing her system. They’ve got her on mild ones, she can tell, which is good. Drugs make her uneasy. It would be too simple for her to slip back into them.

     “Jay?” she asks. Her voice cracks and rasps, but he hears her and lifts his head.

     “How do you feel?”

     “Not bad,” she says. “Why are you sleeping on that chair?”

     “There’s only one bed.”

     “You know that’s not what I mean.”

     Jay smirks. “Well, yeah, but I thought I’d annoy you to see if you were _really_ feeling better.”

     “How long have you been waiting around here?”

     “A few hours,” Jay says. “Most of the night.”

     “Well, I suppose I’d do the same for you,” Erin muses.

     He laughs. “I hope so!”

     There’s a quiet knock at the door and a nurse pokes her head in. “Detective Lindsay?”

     “Yeah?” Erin says, struggling to sit up. Jay moves automatically to her side and props a couple of pillows behind her.

     “You have a visitor,” the nurse says.

     Leonor Acosta still looks small, but the fear has gone from her face, vanished along with the cuts and bruises. Her dark hair winds over her shoulder in a single fat plait, making her face look rounder and healthier. She crosses the room to stand by the edge of Erin’s bed.

     “Hi,” Erin says, and smiles, feeling the cut on her lip stretch and sting with the movement.

     “I heard what you did,” Leonor murmurs. Her face is sombre. Erin remembers that dark, concrete basement and thinks that they have something in common now. She meets Leonor’s eyes and wonders if the girl is thinking the same.

     “It’s my job, and I’m going to be fine,” Erin reassures her. “How are you?”

     “Better,” the girl admits. “I’m actually staying in a really nice place. There are a lot of kids there, but it’s, you know, safe and stuff.” She pauses. “They said I might have to be a witness when Costa has his trial.”

     “You’re very brave,” Erin tells her. “Trials aren’t as scary as everyone makes out. It’s nothing to someone as brave as you.”

     The compliment makes Leonor stand up a little straighter. “Well, I just wanted to say, you know… thanks.”

     Erin reaches out and takes the girl’s hand. “Call me, okay? If you need to talk. Any time.”

   “Yeah,” Leonor nods. “Okay.” She reaches forward then, with both arms out, and Erin complies, folding the girl into a tight hug. She feels her breath catch and her ribs burn with pain, but she ignores it until Leonor has left.

     “Halstead,” she says then, “are my ribs fractured?”

     “Only two of them,” he shrugs, like it’s no big deal.

     “ _Only_ two?”

     “Hey, I broke five ribs once. _Five_.”

     There’s a break in the flow of banter. Jay settles back into his chair, but he pulls it over closer to the bed.

     “Will you wait with me until I can go home?” Erin checks.

     “Yeah,” he says, “of course. I’ve got your back, remember?”

     “I know.”

 

The hospital staff don’t seem particularly pleased when Erin leaves later in the day, but there’s not much they can do to stop her. She’s given pain medication and sent on her way.

     Jay drives her back to her apartment and follows her up the stairs. He watches her let herself in and then he follows her inside and throws himself down happily on her couch.

     “Bliss,” he says. “It’s soft.”

     Erin laughs at him. “That’s what you get for sleeping on one of those hard hospital chairs.”

     “Too true,” Jay agrees ruefully. He rubs the back of his neck. “I’m too old for that.”

     “I’m going to shower,” Erin tells him. “Probably five or six times.”

     “I’ll wait here,” he says easily. “Have a nap.” He hesitates. “That’s okay?”

     She really doesn’t want him to leave. “I mean, yeah, if you want to stay.”

     “It’s a nice couch,” he says decisively. “Comfy.”

     Erin smiles and goes to shower.

***

Jay dozes off to the sound of running water, but he wakes up when Erin comes out of the bathroom and sits beside him on the couch. She’s rubbing her hair with a towel. It’s drying curly around her face, and she looks happier than she has done in a long time.

     “Feels better?” Jay guesses.

     There’s a plastic bag taped over Erin’s plaster cast now, and she starts to peel it off when she says, “Yeah, much better.”

     She’s wearing a loose sweater which slides off one shoulder. Jay can see bruises; on her neck, her collarbone, her shoulder.

     Erin catches him watching her. “It looks worse than it is,” she promises. “You should see my ribs, though. I’m practically purple with bruises.” She leans back into the sofa, resting her cast on her leg. Jay leans back beside her.

     “What happened at that party,” Jay begins, hesitant, and then stops. He’s sort of expecting Erin to cut him off, but she doesn’t, just watches him expectantly with dark eyes. “We should talk about it,” Jay finishes, lamely.

     “Jay, you’re my partner,” Erin says. “And yeah, you’re kind of hot – don’t get a swelled head – and you’re funny, and I’ve kissed you a couple of times and it was,” she blows out a breath, “intense. But we’re good where we are, aren’t we?”

     “Are we?” Jay turns the question back on her.

     “I just don’t know where it would go from here. Plus, there’s Voight.”

     “Who cares about Voight?”

     Erin laughs, hopelessly. “Everyone.”

     “Apart from them.”

     She laughs again, and Jay smiles quietly, pleased with himself. She deserves to laugh.

     “We said one day, didn’t we?”

     Jay remembers. “Yeah, we did.”

     “So,” she says, “one day.”

     They’re quiet for a few minutes. Jay moves closer to Erin on the sofa, and touches her face, gently.

     “Can we just have – one – where we’re not drunk or undercover or something?”

     Erin reaches up her left arm and threads her fingers through his hair. “Yeah, all right,” she says.

     Jay kisses her. It’s slow, and sweet, and a little bit sad. He keeps his hand on the side of Erin’s face, and the other hand resting on her thigh. Afterwards, when Erin pulls away, there’s blood on her lip.

     “Did you just bleed in my mouth?” he asks. “Ew.”

     “Sorry,” she laughs, swiping her tongue over the cut.

     They settle back down, reclining along the sofa. Jay props his feet up on the coffee table. Erin drops her head to rest on his shoulder and yawns widely.

     “I don’t think I can move,” Jay tells her. “I might have to stay here on this couch all night.”

     “Shame,” Erin says. “Don’t think I’m staying here with you.”

     “You’re just mean.”

     “I’m not. I’m nice.”

     He moves his arm around her shoulders so that she can put her head on his chest. “You’re not that bad, I suppose.”

     Erin falls asleep first, going heavy and limp on his arm. Jay watches her for a little while and tries to think deep, meaningful thoughts, but his mind is filmed with a fog of exhaustion. He closes his eyes not long after she does.

    

It’s dark when Erin suddenly hisses his name. “Are you still there?”

     Jay opens his eyes. “I’m here.”

     “Just checking,” Erin mumbles. She’s moved to the other side of the sofa in her sleep, but now she scoots back closer to him and curls up against his side. “You should probably go home.”

     “Mmm,” Jay agrees, warm and lazy. He puts his arm over Erin’s back.

     “You should go now,” she yawns, but she’s wrapped one arm around him and the other is hanging onto the back of his shirt.

     “Yeah,” Jay says amicably. He closes his eyes again. “Bye.”

     “Bye,” Erin whispers. “See you at work.”

     Neither of them moves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this has wrapped up most of the action, but I'd like at least one more chapter with some post-action recovery stuff, just because this was actually a Lindsay/Halstead fic, and then it got a bit distracted by the action and the crimes and all that jazz, so I'd like to bring it full circle and stick in more plain Lindsay/Halstead bonding before I finish up. :)
> 
> Let me know how you're feeling about the fic so far! I do love feedback, obvs. Unless it's stupid feedback. Is that even called feedback? Um. Hm.


	10. Chapter 10

Jay wakes up first.

     His eyes are scratchy and tired, and it takes him a while to actually keep them open. Carefully, he extricates himself from the couch and Erin’s legs, which are lying across his, and goes into the bathroom.

     After he’s splashed water on his face and rinsed his mouth out, Jay feels better. More alert than he has been in a long time, actually. It’s just past ten in the morning, so he’s had plenty of sleep.

     “Coffee,” he says, mostly to himself, and makes a beeline for the kitchen, where he discovers that Erin has instant coffee but no food. So that kind of sucks.

     Jay starts boiling the kettle and hunts for sugar in the cupboards. He finds two relatively clean mugs, washes a spider out of one of them, and sets them beside the kettle. There’s sugar in the larder but no milk in the fridge.

     “Erin,” he says, “do you want your coffee black?”

     She’s rolled over on the couch so that her face is mashed into the pillows. Jay thinks he hears her mumble something, but he has no idea what she’s said.

     “There’s no milk,” he tells her. “Also no food and I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

     Erin ignores him and presses her face deeper into the sofa. Jay stretches his arms over his head, switches off the kettle and decides to go shopping.

***

For a while, Erin floats in a warm sort of place where she’s almost awake but not quite there yet. She stretches her feet out and pushes against the arm of the couch and it’s all nice and comfortable.

     Pain is the thing that comes back first. She lifts a hand to scratch at her chin and feels the twinge as she pulls one of the stitches, and then pain returns everywhere else in a huge rush all at once, so that for a minute all Erin can do is lie there and feel the pain.

     She feels a little bit sick when she remembers, with the clarity of rest, exactly what happened over the past few days. Carefully, she sits up and puts her feet on the floor.

     “Jay?” she calls. The word makes her head throb and her ribs burn. She needs painkillers.

     The apartment is silent. It’s eerie, the silence, actually, because Erin’s been living with so many people for so long. She forces herself to stand up and walk around a little bit. There are mugs in the kitchen with coffee grains at the bottom but the apartment is empty. Jay obviously was here, but now he’s not.

     Erin feels unreasonably anxious, but then she realises that this is the first time she’s been alone in _weeks._ Finally she has a chance to hear herself think, so she sits back down on the couch and thinks hard.

***

Erin’s awake when Jay lets himself back into the apartment with the key he stole.

     “I bought milk!” he calls. “And bread and cheese and butter and eggs and bacon. And blueberries, just because I felt like fruit was sort of a staple but I couldn’t be bothered to find any so I just grabbed blueberries. Is that okay?”

     “Sounds intense,” Erin calls back. “Give me a second, I’ll be right out.”

     She’s in the bedroom, from the sound of it, so Jay goes into the kitchen and starts boiling the kettle again. He unloads shopping into the fridge and considers what he wants for breakfast. Toast? Grilled cheese sandwiches? Eggs and bacon? Omelettes with cheese? He feels like he’s actually bought too much food, if he can’t choose what to eat.

     Erin’s home phone rings. Without thinking, Jay picks it up and says, “Hello?”

     “Halstead?” someone growls on the other end.

     Jay thinks; _crap_ , and carefully answers, “Yeah?” He picks up the kettle and pours boiling water into both mugs.

     “What the hell are you doing there?” his boss asks him.

     “Providing moral support and stuff. You know, being a good partner? I don’t know why that’s a problem.”

     “Hm,” Voight grunts.

     Jay takes a chance, because he’s feeling reckless, and says, “I’m pretty sure if Erin was a man this wouldn’t be a problem.”

     “Except she’s not,” Voight tells him. “Would you just put her on the phone already?”

     Oh. Right. Jay covers the mouthpiece and yells, “Erin! It’s your _dad_!”

     “Told you not to call him that,” she returns easily, and then she comes out of the bedroom in a baggy hoodie and grabs for the phone. “Hi, Hank.” A pause. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

     Jay decides he’ll go for toast, and pulls two slices out of the bag. Erin waves her hand in front of his face to attract his attention, points at the toast and then at herself. She wants some.

     ‘Toaster?’ Jay mouths.

     She shrugs. “I don’t need two weeks off,” she says to Voight. “No, my arm’s fine. The cast’s coming off really soon.”

     Jay checks cupboards and eventually finds the toaster under the oven. He hauls it out, plugs it in, and starts making toast.

     “ _Everything’s_ fine,” Erin says, frustrated. “Yeah, okay, I’ll take one week, but seriously, that’s it. I’ll come back in and sit at my desk or something.” She waits, then says, “Okay, uh huh.”

     Jay grabs the butter from the fridge and a knife from a drawer. Where are plates? He turns to Erin and she’s already pointing at them, in the cupboard over the sink. Good.

     “Stop bullying Halstead,” Erin adds. “He’s helping me out.” She grins at him.

     He laughs when Erin hangs up. “Wow, you certainly told _him_.”

     “Did you buy jam or anything?” she asks.

     “No.”

     “Juice?”

     “No.”

     “Huh. Can I have my coffee, then?”

     “It’s on the bench,” he says, pointing. “Milk’s in the fridge.”

     “Good.” Erin grabs the milk out while Jay butters toast. She stops, and then says, “I can’t get the lid off.”

     He laughs at her. “Haven’t you ever had a broken arm before?”

     “Yeah, when I was, like, six.”

     Jay takes the milk bottle from her. “Only the one?”

     “I only remember one.”

     “I did mine twice when I was eleven,” he tells her, pouring the milk. “Within two months, as well.”

     “You were a careless child,” she laughs. She brings the coffee up to her mouth and takes a sip, then says, “Mm. Hot.”

     “I am, aren’t I?” Jay grins. He winks, too.

     Erin punches his shoulder with her broken arm; gently. “You wish.”

     “Actually, I’m pretty sure you said so just the other night.”

     “Shut up.”

   “No, really.”

     “Just shut up.”

***

They talk and eat their way through most of the morning, but when Erin looks at the microwave and it says quarter past twelve, she says, “Uh oh.”

     “What?” Jay asks.

     “You should probably go home. It’s past midday.”

     “Wow, it is too,” he notes. “And I have work tomorrow, unlike some lazy slackers, so I guess I’d better get back and wash up and stuff.”

     “You still kind of smell like hospital,” Erin tells him.

     “But I changed my clothes!”

     “It’s soaked into your skin,” she jokes.

     “I’ll go, then,” Jay says. He takes his time getting ready to go, making excuses to delay, checking around the apartment for things that he obviously hasn’t left here. Erin doesn’t mind. She appreciates his company, but she can’t ask him to stay. Not yet. That’s crossing a line, she thinks, and she’s not ready for it yet.

     Eventually, Jay’s standing by the door with his jacket on and his keys in his hand.

     “I’ll see you when I get back to work, I suppose,” Erin says.

     “Maybe I’ll drop by,” Jay says, and it sounds more like a question than a statement. “Tomorrow or something. Just to see how you’re getting on. You know, maybe open your milk and stuff.”

     “Yeah,” Erin nods. She smiles, so he knows she means it. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

     “Well good,” Jay tells her. “Tomorrow, then.”

     “Tomorrow.” Erin closes the door on his dimples and huffs out a sigh. She looks around. The apartment seems suddenly empty without Jay, and she’s not exactly sure what to do with herself. She finds a book and settles herself on the sofa, pretending to relax even though the silence makes her jumpy.

     It’s not a big deal, though, she tells herself. After all, tomorrow is only hours away and then he’ll be back here, laughing and joking and pissing her off like he’d never left at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All done! Yay! I hope you enjoyed the fic and stuff! This one was a lot of fun to write.
> 
> I have a couple more Jay/Erin fics in mind but I might wait a while to post them and see where canon goes! Let me know if you'd like to see more, though :) It's always lovely to get kudos and comments, so a massive thank you to everyone for those!


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